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.
