If you love character films, "Another Year" is the film for you. Granted, even for a British film, it seemed rather slow for most of the first half but I couldn't stop watching---the characters lured me immediately and persistently.

Lesley Manville plays Mary: a very pretty and exceedingly lonely woman who tries painfully hard to create a life for herself. The depths of her despair but valiant effort to be happy is paralleled by her best friend Gerri, played perfectly by Ruth Sheen. Gerri and Mary have worked together for twenty years. Gerri has always initiated kind and regular invitations to Mary to come to dinner.

Gerri and Tom (played by the brilliant Jim Broadbent) have a mature and loving ease to their marriage of so many years. They are solid realists. Their compassion for their friends and family is equal, their acceptance for a broad range of people in their lives is not only notable but admirable. They have a great heart each and melded together as a couple. Mary has had a tough time of it and it is apparent to the audience that she needs Gerri.

As she and Tom have always invited Mary to dinner for twenty years, Mary has also watched their son grow up---who is now thirty and still single. Mary has a gift for "getting ideas" about things that are not always true. She's a bit naive and therefore foolish---yet generally harmlessly so. Until one night....

Mike Leigh (writer/director) carefully develops---no, allows his characters to evolve---through ordinary, daily living that as each character's desires come more into focus, they also come into conflict with the desires of others. This drives the story to bring these relationships to a troubling climactic point: Mary's loneliness and deluded need to belong is more than awkward when she meets Joe's (played sweetly by Oliver Maltman) serious girlfriend when he surprises his parents by bringing her to dinner one night. While everyone "understands" Mary is quirky, no one foresees how toxic her pain has become. Nor how protective Gerri can be of her family.

Has Mary finally overstepped her bounds? Will Gerri and Tom turn on her afterall? Has she lost her best friend Gerri forever?

Other characters enter the story to fill out these three who are the pivotal characters. The film is tender and haunting. These characters will hold your attention and your heart.

It would seem that popular culture is spinning out of control with hypersensitivity to a frenetic need to be in touch with everyone---fast, furious, superficial hydroplaning relationships. Thank God for Mike Leigh. This film is human, rooted, stable, real in its depiction of how beautiful and calm life can be, and how each of us longs for friends like Gerri and Tom. Some of us even wish we could be them. We still need to slow down, to touch the earth, to touch each other, to linger in the presence of those we love.

It's not a feel-good movie, but it is hopeful and satisfying. The characters are so distinctive and memorable. I hope everyone involved receives the recognition they deserve for this meaningful collaboration.

See the film.

A Twist of Faith...

Once again I have fallen in love . . . with a character from a 2009 Finnish film called "Letters to Father Jacob." Father Jacob has spent untold years living alone in a rectory in the pristine woodlands of outerlying Helsinki. He seems content, he seems patient, he seems dedicated to his mission of receiving letters requesting prayer and returning encouraging words from the Holy Scriptures which we learn later he has never read himself because he has always been blind. Still, he sees far more than most of us.

One day a woman in the nearby penitentiary is pardoned after believing for over a decade she would spend her life imprisoned. The prison official releasing her encourages her to fulfill a priest’s request for an assistant to help him read his mail and pen his responses. With no ties to family or friends, having severed all contact during her incarceration, Leila has no where else to go so finds her way to Father Jacob’s home.

Every day the mailman brings letters, and with deep concern Father Jacob prays and responds as this is his life’s purpose. Leila is a woman of few words; her facial expressions speak loudly of her contempt that the old man is wasting his time. Then one day the letters stop coming.

While the story is somewhat predictable, it is far from cliche. And while things happen that are heartbreaking, the quiet, persistent power of faith—or rather, the power of love—will open anyone’s heart who needs, as Father Jacob says, "to believe that there is someone watching over them."

It is not preachy. Not a sermon. Not even a morality tale. It is not soft. Tender is not the word, either. But it is poignant and beautifully crafted. It is a love letter that ends just like you expect it to. With a profound twist on what you believe, or fear, about having a purpose in life.

The above is a summary review. But here is my further reflection with spoilers. I marvel at how thoroughly and powerfully Christian Catholic the film is. There is a clever and clear message that it isn’t just about the pardon, but about the discipleship—and that word may have become too specialized when really what it means is time and patience are needed in a relationship where one is given the space and invitation to feel safe enough to learn what the gift of being pardoned really and deeply is. But the gift isn’t just one way.

These two characters are revealed in the subtle exchanges. Jacob several times insinuates Leila’s corroboration signifies companionship, a shared mission, and each time he takes that liberty, she summarily slaps him back into his loneliness. Likewise she is hardened against believing these letters matter at all; they seem silly and a waste of time and she even throws more than half of one day’s stack down the well.

When the letters stop coming, it is natural to assume that it’s the terrified mailman who is simply withholding them because of his fear of Leila, the "Lifer." But Jacob has no knowledge of their conflict or the threat the mailman has increasingly felt. All he knows is that every day the mailman on his bicycle turns before coming to the parsonage. He wrestles with this profoundly to the point where he contrives, or hallucinates, that he is needed for a wedding ceremony, needed for a funeral. He fears his life has lost meaning. He visibly struggles in prayer, his spirit is tormented; no one needs him. He struggles with the inevitability of the end of his life. This is his "Gethsemane" where he is coming to terms with death. Leila comes to find him and is horrified by his insanity and when she storms out of the little church, he takes his final Eucharist and stretches out in front of the altar to die.

Leila goes back to the rectory, packs, calls a cab and tries to leave but can’t—not because she can’t leave the old man, as some film reviewers suggest, but because she has despaired that she has no where to go, and Jacob has lost his mind, so she tries to hang herself in the bedroom.

However, Jacob’s purpose isn’t finished yet. He is awakened by the leak in the roof gently dripping water on his face. Leila manages to recover herself and take the rope off her neck when he comes into the house. A momentary sense of hope sweeps over his face in finding she is still there, he’s no doubt heard the taxi come and go. Yet he takes himself to bed as the days continue without letters. Leila confirms it isn’t the mailman hoarding them and instructs him to come the following day at the usual time to announce that there are letters—she intends to retrieve the letters from the well but that is a lost cause, laying the ground work for mutual redemption.

The mailman comes and shouts "Letter for Father Jacob" as he was instructed, but there are no letters; he hands her a catalogue. She will have to make up letters. As Leila takes this profound step of attempting to protect Father Jacob from despair, she succeeds in opening her own heart. Their relationship has become mutual in their gift to one another. Neither is aware of this, of course, but to keep Jacob from wholly losing heart, Leila begins to "read" a letter which is, of course, her own story, and now as they are truly entering the space of trust and reciprocation where they sit together outside under the enormous tree that shelters their wicker chairs and small table, she is at confession. What I find fascinating is that the depth of her confession is not that she murdered the man who was abusing her sister, but that she believed that in doing so, or not doing it sooner, has ruined her sister’s life. This is her guilt, her core for remorse: a broken relationship.

Leila, now at the point of openness, can receive the gift Jacob has had waiting by the side of his bed—the stack of letters her sister wrote asking Jacob for prayer. There were hints all along that he was responsible for her pardon, and we suspect that something like this has transpired. Her sister has "never stopped writing" and longs for word from her sister, longs for the relationship to be restored. Now the journey has come full circle and Leila is not only free from prison, she is free to go home to her sister who has never given up on the hope of reunion.

Ultimately, though, for Leila to be truly pardoned, to fully realize her freedom beyond being physically pardoned from life in prison, Jacob has had to walk a difficult stretch of his own path to the epiphany he is given before death. His revelation is, for me, far more profound than Leila’s. He has believed his whole life that he is helping God, that he is helping to bring people closer to God through his prayers by way of this correspondence. He comes to realize, humbly, that perhaps he is not helping God so much as God is helping him by bringing letters to him so that he feels needed, and this is how God has daily brought him closer to Himself. In this way, the intimacy of a mutually giving relationship is completed for Jacob. All that he has seen on behalf of others lands in his own heart that he, too, has needed someone to watch over him, and now has needed to learn intimately that Someone has been watching over him all along.

The most surprising thing about the film is that it is only 75 minutes long. It is so successfully captivating, enthralling, that immersion is inevitable and transportation into this other world, into the depths of these two characters, is complete and sustaining.

If you have read this whole reflection prior to seeing this film, I sincerely hope it hasn’t taken the place of your desire to experience the film yourself. No doubt, a masterful story like this has the capacity to bring a slightly different gift to each viewer. Please see the film yourself.

last night's dream...

I was out with a friend. I only remember city scenes and almost hotel like lobbies so maybe we were traveling. The phone rang. But before that or because of that but beyond that the phones were some kind of focus. Kept changing shape—well not really the shape but rather the size of its rectangular dimensions. It looked like every device that’s been advertised on the market—particularly an iphone, blackberry or flat screen tv. So many overwhelmingly crowded bits that I could see nothing and the screen kept changing, not just when I swept my finger across it to twirl the images to the left, but seemingly at random. At some point in the noise encrusted evening of the dream the phone rang and I couldn’t quite make out how to answer it because it had changed and then the ringing stopped and the phone stretched to a larger size, not enabling me to read the itty bitty things better but only to cram more itty bitty things under my nose.

Somehow I detected it was Dad who had tried to reach me and it was so noisy and lively where I was, I figured just as well I missed it, I’ll call him back.

But the phone rang again and then I knew, could feel, something was up, so I did my best to answer it and couldn’t. There’s a little screen near the top of this flat thing and briefly there came an image among the high tech, high flash, neurotic sales bits and movie trailers, briefly there came an image of my Dad sitting in his chair with the bubby standing on his chest in respiratory distress and the look on my father’s face and in his eyes at the camera, at me, was holy terror that the most precious thing in his life couldn’t breathe and if something wasn’t done immediately . . . And so I began to try to call him back except the phone kept taking over. I couldn’t dial the number because the place and pattern of dialing kept changing. The friend who was with me stood by helplessly with her own phone. I was crazy, the harder I tried to dial the number the worse it got and more obnoxious the changing tones and choices for apps and advertisements on the phone. The frantic chaos of it all is indescribable. Even a hotel steward tried to help and merely got in the way like another app or change of screen and the sounds kept following all the frenetic sounds of mass advertising and blockbuster meaningless films and I couldn’t make the phone make a simple phone call or save a life and I was distraught and beside myself.

And when I awoke, there was no break from dreaming, my emotional distress and angst in my throat still linger now thirty minutes later. I cannot get the panicked look on my father’s face out of my mind or throat or that feeling of utter powerlessness to save him or that wonderful little dog...and I realize as I write this that it was my own phone number I kept trying to dial into the phone.

*Spoiler* (I tried so hard not to...but...)

Everything just needs to get back to how it was before.

Cillian Murphy is brilliant. If you love psychological thrillers, true psychological thrillers, this is the film for you! LOVED it. Great story, tight tight tight story. No condescending explanations or monologues or voice overs.

Set in the 1950s, the slow and subtle revelation of one man’s traumatic struggle unfolds among kind, caring, but wholly inept citizens of a small town called Peacock, Nebraska, population 800. A year after his mother dies, a train crashes, leaving a caboose planted firmly in his back yard and his whole world begins to unravel. Worse yet, the mayor and his wife want to use the caboose, with its sign to "re-elect Senator Wyatt" draped on the back, to gather a rally to redirect voters’ attention.

You see, John has a problem. Today we might be fooled into thinking it’s asperger’s. But the real psychological problem is far deeper than that.

He is adamant that everything just needs to get back to how it was before.

Nobody does creepy better than Cillian Murphy ("Batman Begins," "Dark Knight," "Inception") . . . and he plays John and Emma with shivering precision and believability (tag: "If he only knew what she was doing"). The rest of the A-list cast provided extraordinary performances, including an equally challenged supervisor, played by Bill Pullman ("Independence Day," "While You Were Sleeping"), the mayor (Keith Carradine of "Damages," "Crash") and his wife (the ever captivating Susan Sarandon), Graham Beckel, Ellen Page, and the strong, involved and kind sherif (Josh Lucas with killer dimples).

The cinematography clips and plays out shots that are pristinely composed, mirroring the character’s severe need for order, routine, and predictability. The severity of the setting of John’s house profoundly conveys the overpowering presence of a mother dead only a year but still haunting every move, every thought, every element of the house—reflected in the heavy lined curtains, the pervasive dark reds and earth tones throughout a dark and boldly furnished home, the tight shots on mysteriously prepared meals, clothes laid out for John each morning, and the notes of instructions signed "Emma." Heavy laden. And yet it is the feminine personality that will ultimately both eliminate and emancipate John Skillpa—the human being beyond the gender.

The film is reminiscent of a classic Hitchcockian thriller but with the style that goes beyond stereotypical conventions of similar tales. The story isn’t about what happened to him as a child, but how he navigates the crisis at hand. While the town is called "Peacock" as is the film, the word fits John’s particular dissociative identity disorder. According to the National Geographic online, "The term ‘peacock’ is commonly used to refer to birds of both sexes." This might be a stretch, but I also found it curious that the peacock’s tale feathers, when spread proudly (think election and rally in the back yard), appear to have eyes everywhere but they do not see.

Compelling. Heart-breaking. Natural. Simple but not easy. Deep without preaching, without condescension. I was tempted to doubt that a town would fail to catch on that one of their own was wholly psychotic, but then names and images of a disturbingly long list of serial killers began flashing in my mind. If I say more I will betray the great initial surprise and the iconic nods yet fresh treatment of such a great story pattern.

So much of the story is familiar. Yet there are surprises and unexpected turns and revelations—subtle, exquisitely crafted depictions of a quintessential internal conflict. More is done with gestures and expressions than with words. Masterful little story. The only real problem I had with the story was its ending. The better ending for the story, I think, was the alternative ending that the dvd includes in the special features section.

Everything just needs to get back to how it was before. Before a mother abused her tiny son. Before a mother rigidly controlled every aspect of her son’s world. Before a mother made it necessary for her son to split his sensibilities in order to survive. The train wreck brings everything to a moment of imminent confrontation—the old ways of coping are no longer working for John. Or Emma.

It was a quarter to 5 on a Wednesday morning near the end of April. Just got out of the shower, crossed the house to the kitchen, walked into the kitchen, flipped on the light and a big gray animal thumped off the chair and scurried across the kitchen floor, flattened himself and disappeared under the oven.

First let me say that Monday evening, the kitchen was swarmed with 470,000 plus carpenter ants flooding through the electrical outlet behind the refrigerator. I discovered this around 9p.m. and was horrified! Ran to Walgreens and got Raid at Mama’s advice, came back and saturated the demons. Two hours later I went back in and vacuumed them all up. So disgusting. I swore I would call Nozzle Nolen the first chance I got after classes the next day but...things got busy...you know how it is. So as I stood paralyzed, not breathing, waiting for the visual imaging to sink in for explanation, I also realized that this was a new pestilence of Exodus proportions, divine intervention, that I could not COULD NOT procrastinate another day.

How long I stood motionless and speechless I cannot say. The animal was a rat about the size of your foot. As I stared in disbelief, realizing I had taken a step backward into the dining room, I heard metal banging and then he poked his head out to launch a getaway from under the oven and I freaked—jumped back and hollered. He turned back under the oven. I remember thinking being very glad that I am a hollerer, not a screamer. Weird but true—it was a proud moment. Still I couldn’t move for a very very long time. To this day I have no idea where he went from there but he somehow got back out of the house.

Needless to say, I didn’t make breakfast. I didn’t gather lunch or even water bottles. I did, as I recall, risk making tea, never taking my eyes off the oven, and verbally expressing loudly everything that I was about to do and what I was doing, just to keep the monster fully hidden from view. I think the only way I got up the courage was to remind myself that he was far more scared than I was....

First chance I got, I called Nozzle Nolen and a guy named Dean met me at home that night. He ultimately quoted about $600 total, wanting a check for $300 before he left. I was depressed because I had wanted to get Mamandad a new tv and this took a chunk out of that intention. But then after he left I checked my email and my check had come and as it turned out it was the check that they didn’t take out insurance for that pay period which was almost exactly $300. Nice.

Dean set traps under the oven and up in the attic. He told me how rats, roof rats, get into a house and he found evidence all through the house. I had left the sliding glass doors open that night before and so I asked if they could have gotten in through the screen which was pulled out at the bottom...he said unlikely, there was plenty of evidence there had been activity in the attic, but I confirmed I had never heard anything from up there, not even squirrels across the shingles outside...he mentioned that there was evidence they’d been in and out of the house before—behind the washer/dryer, under the oven, even (and this is so sick I don’t even want to record it) there was a poop between the bed and the closet in my room so no doubt that trespasser had gone in there the night before the morning I caught him! OR during the day after I left perhaps as he was trying to get out... Horrifying to think they were coming in and out every night as I left the doors open!!! But I had closed up for the past couple of weeks...and this was the earliest I had been up and I had not yet turned on the tv so the usual sounds didn’t get rid of them maybe. I had also closed up the house before I left so I wonder how the rat got out while I was at school. But I’m not spending a lot of time thinking about it.

That night after Dean had been there to set traps, I thought I might have heard a scuffle and thud from upstairs but apparently not because nothing was ever found. That night and several nights after I had REAL TROUBLE going to sleep, that’s for sure!

Todd came out on Saturday and checked...then about every three days for the next two weeks. Finally on Monday (5.10.10) he said he thought we could start the "exclusion" process—sealing up the house, starting with the screen against the porch which I asked him about because clearly it was busted, and clearly to me it was how the rodents were getting in. The Thursday before Mother’s Day weekend I came out here and cleaned thoroughly and that’s when, to my horror, I found piles of rat poop behind the tools I have in the corner for outside. Well a lot of that was fairly recent because it hadn’t been that long before I had cleaned it so I was sick! I cleaned it all out thoroughly and took a long hot shower after.

Then the next morning, Friday, I saw five or six fresh poops out there and they were not lizard poops! So I sprayed them with bleach just to kind of neutralize how gross it was so Mamandi could sit out there over the weekend. Then when Todd came back Monday and saw them he said he was pretty sure they were lizard poops but he couldn’t swear to it without a microscope and I gave him my teacher look that said I wasn’t as stupid as he looked, because they were rat poops.

So Thursday, knowing he was coming Friday or Saturday, I decided to take the two giant sticky panels out from under the oven and put them by the screen where it was unrolled, then I went all the way out on the patio and poked the rubber thingy back against the screen to refasten it but only half heartedly—that way it would be less likely to be a poor lizard coming through there and getting stuck rather than a rat who would easily come through to get to the slim jims on the sticky pad. It’s why they’re called rats—they don’t care what they tear up to get through to the tasty stuff. But still can’t figure out what it was about the patio that communicated to them that it was a potty. Anyway, during the night it occurred to me...what would I do if I DID catch something?

Friday morning, as the sun began to slowly send out rays, just before time to leave for school, I carefully chose the angle of my checking to see if I’d caught anything and I saw a tail curled on it and a leg...didn’t seem to be moving. A tad disturbing but also gratifying (those WERE rat poops! I KNEW it!) and I went on my way to school. I certainly wasn’t going to try to do anything with a dead rat before school! I was also entertaining the notion it would be just fine right there until Todd came back even if that wasn’t until Saturday. I was then under the mistaken impression that those sticky pads somehow also were poisonous.

After school I had a chiropractic appointment and Mastellone and I swapped rat stories. They lived on a small stretch of acreage with a barn and a gorgeous owl and never had rats until the neighbor cut down trees just at the lot line so the owl would move away so he could build there (what a jerk) and after that, when the owl did move away, it wasn’t but a couple of months before Mastellone heard the scuttle and shuffle of rats in the barn. He said he learned a very valuable lesson about those giant sticky pads. Rats can get stuck in them for a minute or two and then they can walk off with them stuck to them and keep struggling and end up dying somewhere rather hidden until the stench emanates. What a yucky yucky story!!! He also advised me the minute I got home to get an old towel I wasn’t planning to keep and just throw it over the thing and dispose of it with minimal visual connection. I agreed that was a very very good idea.

Got home around 5 or 5:30 and had been gathering the courage to see for sure that it was a rat and not a giant lizard tail...I looked through the sliding glass doors and ... the pad was gone! I looked all around the screened porch from the safety behind the closed glass doors. It took a minute to register that the rat had no doubt regained its composure and managed to pull himself and that pad back through the screen! I looked as well as I could onto the patio beyond...nothing...I gathered all my courage and went out to the screen and looked as far into the yard as I could...nothing. Unbelievable, where could it have gone! Did another animal come and take it away? I ventured through the screen door out into the courtyard and looked. Nothing. I went further out and about and saw nothing under the bushes or in the boston ferns. Nothing behind the oak tree or around the other side of the bay kitchen window, nothing. Freaky freaky.

Came back into the house to get the phone because I had to call Todd anyway and of course I had to tell him this! I noticed he had called at some point but instead of listening to his message I just called back through. He mentioned having been sick this week—well it was a crazy week for me too. And he asked if "tomorrow" was still okay to come work on the screen and I said sure but I had to tell him what happened. So I told him the whole story—getting the sticky pads out, seeing the tail and leg that morning, Mastellone’s story of the barn rats, then coming home to find nothing anywhere so that rat made off with the sticky pad or another animal got him or something.

He chuckled and said, "Well, as it turns out, I had to be in the neighborhood today on another job and dropped by your place to measure out the screen area for tomorrow and saw you had caught something so I just took care of it for you." We laughed and I thanked him and then he said, still chuckling, "Let me tell you this. If you had caught a rat strong enough to get up and pull that pad through the screen and get off the property without it getting caught up in anything in your courtyard and disappear, I would be advising you to find another neighborhood to live in because that would just be too much rat! And I would be finding another line of work!" We laughed.

So now the screen is fixed and next week begins the exclusion of the roof areas as well as traps being set out in various places around the yard.

"Dad, I have no idea who you are because you’ve never told me a single fact," says Will, the journalist son of a story telling salesman.

"I’ve told a thousand facts, Will. It’s what I do, I tell stories!"

"You tell lies, Dad. You tell amusing lies. . . I believed you. I believed your stories so much longer than I should have." He looks away in shame as he reveals his regret at having trusted his father.

"You think I’m fake?" his father responds.

"Only on the surface, Dad. But it’s all I’ve ever seen." The problem for Will is that he’s about to have a son and, "it would kill me if he went through his whole life never understanding me."

The pain this accusation evokes in the father, played poignantly, heart-breakingly by Albert Finney, lingers on the man’s face as he repeats his son’s statement. "It will kill you, huh? What do you want, Will? Who do you want me to be?"

"Yourself . . . just show me who you are for once."

With clarity and great dignity, Mr. Bloom declares, "I’ve been nothin’ but myself since the day I was born. And if you can’t see that, it’s your failin’, not mine."

As this verbalizes the central conflict of the film, we of course begin to see some pretty unusual (bordering on the mythical) experiences in Will’s helping his folks that confirm "facts" about his father.

By this point, too, our suspicions have been satisfied that there are many meanings to the title:

Big Fish in a little pond

Big Fish that got away

Big Fish is a tall tale

Big Fish is a woman you’ll never catch

Big Fish is the father whose stories about himself make him larger than life...

In a word, the "big fish" is elusive and will get away.

The son needs facts to know his father. Knowing the stories served to disillusion him. It’s obvious to us that the son is blind deaf and dumb—his father is a consummate story teller. THAT’s who he is. If we don’t catch that, then it’s revealed to us as it is revealed to the son in the climax of the film in the dialogue above. Anyone who knows anything about life knows that the story teller is the most important person in the world. Anyone who knows anything about himself knows that a father is the most important person in his life. The most elusive. The most critical to formation. The most difficult to know intimately. The most difficult to individuate from while growing up.

The Irish are the first to implore you not to let the facts get in the way of a good story. But a child in search of himself must first go in search of his father, apparently. Are you searching for the true identity of your father? Answers to all the reasons for the quirks, odd comments, embarrassments in public, strange persisting habits, unexplained gaps in his life’s story? As is also true of a good story, this one, originally told in the novel by Daniel Wallace, and now here by John August and directed by the transcendent, enigmatic Tim Burton, this story may be just what you need on your own journey of self-discovery and the kind of forgiveness that embraces our parents. C. S. Lewis once said that we read to know we’re not alone. Another powerful gift in a good story.

The thin subcutaneous line between what is imaginary and what is imagined...what the truth is and the way the truth is told...is magical in this film. Even the characters seem to not get the difference. "If I had to choose between the true version and an elaborate one involving a fish and a wedding ring, I might choose the fantasy version," says old Dr. Bennet (Robert Guillame) to the waiting son in the hospital at his father’s bedside. Fantasy version? Is that part of the point? We interpret story as fantasy? We can’t bear very much reality, T.S.Eliot says to us and so this reality must be transformed by the way we imagine our lives; is the essence of our embrace of that life, of events, of relationships, of desires, of successes, of failures, of the way things are.

After the son hears the fact of his birth, his father awakens distraught about needing to get to the river. And Will presents to him the story of waking to find his father awaking and ready to escape....

Was it the truth that set him free to participate in his father’s story? His father needs water. His father needs to go to the river. The son colludes by telling his father the story of their conspiratorial escape to the river. Of course, the greatest universal symbol for both life as well as death is the river.

We all know from the very beginning of the story that the fish who got away is the metaphor for the father, and a metaphor encompassing the son’s lifelong pursuit of knowing his father, yet there is far more beauty and satisfaction in the film than the pieces revealed here. The greatest gift the son gives to his father is companionship at the end of his life in the context of the gift the father had given his son since birth: story telling—the gift of dying as he’d lived, in the context of an elaborate story...only to find out that the gift of all his stories was not the lie he had presumed. All the characters embodied in his father’s stories show up at the funeral.

"You become what you always were . . ." The story will save you. It will inform who you are. It will carry on beyond you and a piece of you will become the breath of its life. This is the metaphor of immortality. The thread that connects us all. And it is why we continue to tell the story.