"I take the side of the animals though," Terrence Hill, Eastwood's dialectical absudist
There are reasons Natasha Richardson interests me as an industry standard-bearer, particularly when juxtaposed against Jodie Foster, the child tom boy who never played lesbian but still challenges gender in subtle fashion, even as a forceful straight heroine who will do what she has to for an imperiled daughter or son. Sequenced into this, Past Midnight is your standard plot point thriller, nothing particularly special about it or Richardson's performance, except that it has the visceral undercurrents that are pertinent to the faux feel good economy of the first Clinton presidency. As an aside, I have no reason to give a flying fuck if Hillary prevails, as the Obama administration managed to kill me; I simply didn't realize this when I supported Barack in the Pennsylvania primary in 2008. If I thought I was a gasping fish out of water in my very early forties, I was under a misapprehension, as I may be hanging on nearly a decade later, but just that, despite consumption of fish oil; Hillary, it is sort of a naturalized anathema. The husband was sexually intriguing, liked women too much, and it remains an embarrassment that his seminal fluid became an impeachment vote while Saudi Arabia's bin Laden was brewing his spectacular blow. There is enough blame to go around for 9/11, but morally Clintonian narcissism was a nearly fatal distraction, so I cannot quite forgive the 42nd president, and think the left is incredibly stupid to elevate his wife for her public injuries in relation to Bill's philandering, but that is the United States, in a nutshell: a pretty woman who wants to engage in social justice becomes a social worker, sets eyes on Rutger Hauer, who cannot possibly be guilty in his role as a slightly more attractive genotype of Anthony Hopkins-- just as Clancy Brown is a tinsel variation on Ron Perlman, who had the courage to humiliate himself as second in rank in The Quest for Fire. Natasha's Laura preens off compliments, picks up her torch, and gets drawn into a threat which would keep most women under psychiatric care for the rest of their lives. Pluralism rarely takes account of the toll in its insistence on the inherent intrinsic value.
We never get to see the aftermath. Films aren't very good at evolving, or in this case, devolving characters, this is why Victor Hugo could write a tome like Les Miserables and we have flawed great classics that do embody full lives of our projected alter egos, even if they are ponderous reads, but Past Midnight strikes chords in terms of how liberalism crushes the spirit of the noble crusade, and ties in with the ambulatory carelessness of Richardson's 2009 death. Yes, on the surface, this seemingly content and happy starlet with her authentic Hollywood romance was simply the victim of a mishap. Beneath the surface, she really wasn't thinking about her age and the risks of learning to ski at 45. Foster, as a more conflicted woman, would have been more instinctually wary. The greater the talent, the better the intuition. Spastic was never held at knife point by a rural slasher with womb triggers, but the dowager has been subjected to everything else short of attempted murder, and yet, even in victimhood, remains, surviving with rage addicted tenacity, while Natasha's vivacious privilege becomes the suddenly absent, perhaps more to her fortune than the pondering with which we cling to temporal circumstance. As a figurine, a paper cut out of the Clinton era, she manages to let the pieces of her part in this film fall into place.
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