"Que paso aqui?"-- Once Upon A Time in Mexico, the main villain
Rodrigo Garcia suggests things about the possibilities and limits of reconciliation in his first film that necessarily hearken back to the themes of his internationally recognized father, absent the lineage issues which occur in the familial intervals which drive One Hundred Years of Solitude. Childhood is merely a suggested anxiety in Things, as opposed to a reward: Kathy Baker's Rose hovers as an overly protective mother of an adolescent right on the edge, still a boy merely toying with manhood, which in turn draws her to the infantile allure of the dwarf Albert, a character of exotic element and due process; in "Love Waits for Kathy" he is simply a file archivist. In the Rose segment he is an intrigue, one who offers the possibility of fulfillment as might be found in Alice In Wonderland, however awkward the comic aspects come across from the cutting floor. The near miss collision, once Baker offers the attractive man toy a ride, is a slap in the face to the viewing audience, an obvious contrivance which comes off as one, an allusion to the risk of hard sex conjoined to the frailty of impairment? Perhaps this is a stretch, but Albert accepts the teacher and nascent author's voyeurism, just as the detective accepts the camaraderie of dating a medical examiner in the field.
Physicians, particularly surgeons, do not care for ailing loved ones as Close does in the Keener narrative, and its weakness isn't quite her fault. The veteran actress projects the longing of the professional woman who lacks on cue, but the emptiness within the doctor's domestic interior, prior to Calista Flockhart's entrance, is too soft, a dripping poached egg, much as the flashback to lesbian petting lacks the courage of conviction in "Goodnight Lilly, Goodnight Christine". If the morality police want to draw inferences about the indulgence of sexual pleasure and impending loss, the blame can be laid at Rodrigo's doorstep. If there is nothing wrong with homosexual orientation, even conscientious directors like Garcia have a hard time selling sexual equality to an (as yet) heterosexually predominant movie goer. Two pretend dykes with no voluptuousness saying goodbye, how sweet, while the suicide victim who opens and concludes the film walks by, an incidental character, perhaps a prospect for Flockhart in the absence of Lilly, but for the fact that women are experts at insulation, a theme which saturates this entire project, from Holly Hunter's discordant violence to her womb, to Diaz'es penetrating monologue, closing the film with a bittersweet irony encapsulating the failure of the post boomer world to at least find some sort of contentment within the middle brow striving to have what we want: an abortion, two blind women girls engaged in thrust and parry, a police officer simply doing a routine investigation. Where is the pleasure of bringing and rearing life in the world? Marquez had it in his novel, which, despite energy, skill, and its Nobel Prize, rolled off the back of this blogger as mostly about style, affect, more an apologia for the insistence of metaphysical mystery than a saga with memorable substance.
The best that can be said of the son: the rise of women has no more solved the problems of liberalism than the male patriarchy which handed over the reigns; it might be argued, however, that Garcia sets the stage for matriarchal novelists like Lionel Shriver, who fragments domestication, also with the suggestive absence of childhood, through her female protagonists.
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