"People let me tell you about my best friend."-- Harry Nilsson
Clifton Collins is a one armed man in the 09 Sunshine Cleaning because he is supposed to stand out as an expert in the peculiar waste management niche Amy Adams' character Rose finds herself, a kind of modern Virgil and ambiguous scarecrow rolled into one, the Winston of empathy and expertise whose knowledge isn't enough to blunt the folly of American dysfunctional narcissism, as it is embodied in Emily Blunt's Norah. As divergent as they are in their respective use of formats, however, scriptwriter and brilliant novelist, Megan Holley and Kazuo Ishiguro are both saying something about the demands of expertise, efficiency, and the negotiation of personal interaction. The 93 adaptation of The Remains of the Day has a komikaze subtextual ruthlessness, absorbed at a cost difficult to take, that the Anthony Hopkins we see twenty years before in Stevens is shallow, somewhat vapid, salvaged by the colonial mercy of gilded age power embodied by Christopher Reeve.
"And I slammed him, this most famous American in his reverberating helplessness."
We all tend to have innocuous thoughts like these running in our minds, even while reflecting on the aesthetic importance of casting. This supporting role as Congressman Lewis was the best acting Reeve ever did, even if Christine Jeffs as a director leads us to fend for ourselves over why the modern moneyed class would preserve an anachronism like a first rate butler.
My body is not as immobile as Reeve's became, and of course I cannot know how he coped internally with the fact that his body was lifeless. All he had left was the salvage of his mind, for a time. He did not have the luxury of my anonymity to be livid, and used the hope of scientific advance as an escape valve. Ambulation was a loss. Other minds simply cannot conceive bipedal locomotion, and those are the cautionary tales.
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