Bill Paxton's Heart Valve

 you have to be considerate of other people-- an adage

The Tom Hanks of Forrest Gump and Castaway is barely recognizable in The Circle. This may be partly due to age, but in this incurious vehicle it seems a deliberate masking, a submergence of the Everyman to Silicon Valley monoculture, despite the fact that the actor’s Eamon Bailey, in a conglomerate stage-on conversation with Emma Watson’s Mae Holland, gives testament to the fact of having a son with cerebral palsy who “lives a full life,” and benefits from the circle’s collective muscle. The dowager cannot speak for all spastics, but she doesn’t live vicariously through video feed, any more than Bill Paxton does, in his composite as Mae’s ailing father, stricken with multiple scoliosis. Ponsoldt, through his attempt to achieve balance, and kayaking in rough waters as a metaphor, leaves the audience behind with a vacillating conclusion, uneven message, and seems more desirous to embrace Google’s abandoned corporate motto, “do no evil,” than not. There seems to be more affect on Holland through her capsize as opposed to Mercer’s vehicular death. Her friend was a limpid foil at best, ditto Paxton’s resistance, yet another lack of recognition in relation to his small screen role.

A johnny come lately to nearly everything, I did not have access to cable when Big Love made its splash, but since I have some scruples about Mormon mainstream legitimacy, I never saw more than a clip of Paxton bringing real time bigamy to life. Smith’s anarchy isn’t particularly compatible with a true scale back of federalism over smaller state governance, though he was a true and mostly half-cocked enemy of state who seemed to think living in a harem would slate his hypersexuality. Though Mormon resistance to mixed marriage is courageous, there is still dubious moral value in cultist heretics calling the kettle black. Hollywood has always had an ambivalence about populism. Ponsoldt is passing the torch to the millennial heirs of Facebook blandishments, but traditionalism reminds us this isn’t as new an anxiety as we like to believe: cf, Andy Griffith, A Face in the Crowd, or Network. We’ve been predicting our hurl over the cliff, mindless lemmings marching toward the death of history, for some time.

I peruse mediocre films in my captivity much like readers engage with franchise novels, nothing wrong with it, and The Circle nodded me off to sleep, not making much of a dent against conglomeration and the limits of its efficacy, but Ponsoldt, since he touched upon bio ethics, individualism in the cloud, might have done more than leave us in the middle of the lake with customer service agents who don’t know what kind of human connection they’re searching for.