Post by Dracula on Nov 3, 2023 19:02:13 GMT -5
All of Us Strangers(10/21/2023)
That this protagonist is a gay man is not incidental to the movie by any means. A big part of why he seems to be interested in re-uniting with his parents beyond he grave is to see how these two people, both very much figures of the 1980s, would respond to learning about his homosexuality as an adult. That particular anxiety added an interesting layer to what would have already been an extraordinary trauma from his being orphaned at a young age and it’s clearly resulted in his rather wounded psyche as an adult. I will say though that of the four actors here with major speaking role, Andrew Scott is probably the weakest of the four which is a bit of a problem since he’s the central character with the most to do. The film also perhaps over-explains itself over the course of that character’s parental discussions which kind of double as therapy sessions, but maybe that just goes with the territory as not every movie needs to do its storytelling through unspoken glances. The movie’s visual style is stylish, especially in parts of the modern sections, but it’s still not what you’d necessarily call a visual tour-de-force or anything. Ultimately the appeal here does come down to the high concept and it engages with that pretty effectively and leads up to a fairly unexpected ending that kind of re-contextualizes some of what came before. Good movie.
***1/2 out of Five
Andrew Haigh’s Weekend felt like something of a breath of fresh air when it came out back in 2011; a very small movie largely revolving around conversations between two gay men in the days after a hook-up, the film found a very low key and humanist way to explore queer themes while acting as a more generalized character study. Haigh’s follow-up films 45 Years and Lean on Pete were also quite good, but they were good in very different ways and only sort of seemed like they came from the same guy who gave us Weekend. Now, some twelve years later we’re finally getting a movie that feels more like it picks up where Weekend left off with All of Us Strangers. Like Weekend that film starts off appearing to largely be about two men (Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal) who meet each other and start a romance, but there’s another side to the film in which the movie’s protagonist finds himself returning to his childhood home and through a sort of magical realist conceit is meet and converse with his parents, both of whom died in a car accident when he was a child. These parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy) appear to be the same age they were when he last remembered them and converse with the adult version of him they never had the chance to meet in a fairly nonchalant way, meaning no time is wasted with them refusing to believe it’s him or whatever. It’s not terribly clear from the movie if they’re ghosts or in a time loop or are perhaps merely something that the character is day dreaming while in an introspective place and it doesn’t really matter to the movie any more than the angelic machinations that allow George Bailey to see a world without him in it in It’s a Wonderful Life.
That this protagonist is a gay man is not incidental to the movie by any means. A big part of why he seems to be interested in re-uniting with his parents beyond he grave is to see how these two people, both very much figures of the 1980s, would respond to learning about his homosexuality as an adult. That particular anxiety added an interesting layer to what would have already been an extraordinary trauma from his being orphaned at a young age and it’s clearly resulted in his rather wounded psyche as an adult. I will say though that of the four actors here with major speaking role, Andrew Scott is probably the weakest of the four which is a bit of a problem since he’s the central character with the most to do. The film also perhaps over-explains itself over the course of that character’s parental discussions which kind of double as therapy sessions, but maybe that just goes with the territory as not every movie needs to do its storytelling through unspoken glances. The movie’s visual style is stylish, especially in parts of the modern sections, but it’s still not what you’d necessarily call a visual tour-de-force or anything. Ultimately the appeal here does come down to the high concept and it engages with that pretty effectively and leads up to a fairly unexpected ending that kind of re-contextualizes some of what came before. Good movie.
***1/2 out of Five
