Good morning blog-readers. This will be my second post in under a month and for once I don't have to start with an apology. It's so good to be writing again! This morning I wanted to take a break from my director's series and use a post to recognize a film for accomplishing something very special.
In my last post I lauded the freshness that Beginners brought to a cliched and hackneyed genre and the 3-dimensional qualities it bestowed on its easily archetypal characters. That film utilized elements that movie-goers had experienced before to create for them an entirely new movie-going experience. The film Another Earth accomplishes the same startlingly impressive feat.
Gazing back into the epochs and annals of cinematic history, one would notice many "movie-shortcuts" (used to get across the main point without actually having to include a dramatic scene in which character development or plot propulsion occurs) that have become tent-poles in the industry -the "music montage" possibly being the most easily recognized of all. Two such tent-poles are the "voice-over monolgue" (where an actor gets to tell the audience what his/her character is feeling rather than having to perform an actual scene where we see what their charcter is going through) and the "news-flash" (which ranges from mutiple flashes of different newspaper headlines to a full-on news-cast where an anchor informs the audience of what happened in a scene we weren't privied to in the film). Another Earth paradoxically manages to include and combine both of these tent-poles while never embracing the "short-cut"-fueled reasons for which either is typically used (thusly bypassing the pitfalls of both).
Another Earth is a film sparse on dialogue, rather choosing to employ the acting talents of its lead (Brit Marling) to bring to life the broken character of Rhoda . To have included wordy "voice-over" monologues for Marling to recite would have been suicide for this beautifully understated film. Instead of using "voice-over" to express the complexity of Rhoda's progressive emotional state, Another Earth makes the inspired decision to use "news-flashes" to accomplish the job normally completed by a "voice-over".
At the start of the movie, Rhoda has just been accepted into MIT and has been drinking. As she drives home, she hears on the radio that another planet has been discovered that could potentially sustain life. Staring out the window to see it as she drives, Rhoda causes a head-on collision that will be the starting action for the film's plot. After 4 years of incarceration, Rhoda is released and goes about searching for ways to make penance.
The first use of a "news-flash" in the film doesn't cheat the audience out of a scene experienced by the movie's characters but informs us of a new planet in the same way that Rhoda finds out. In lesser movies, the audience may not get to undergo the same thing as the film's heroine, having to settle for a "news-flash" of the events, and thus losing the possibility of the audience's empathy through a shared experience. But not only does this film not use "new-flashes" to cheat its viewers out of scenes (allowing us to see them only when a character does), it also employs them to illuminate our view of Rhoda's progression of ideas for atonement and the conclusions she comes to because of them.
Much was learned about the new planet from the night of its discovery to the day of Rhoda's release. The planet apparently mirrors earth and is poulated with inhabitants just like us. There is another me, another you, another Rhoda. Did the other me make the same mistakes as I have? Did you make all the same choices there as you did here on our earth? Did Rhoda still get in a crash that night?
The "news-flashes" feature commentators who provide far more than just information for plot propulsion. They ask these same questions. They ponder. They wonder. They philosophically discuss the subjective rather than just inform of the objective. They voice all of what goes on in Rhoda's head. Though it's their voices that do the talking, they function as Rhoda's "voice-over".
Never has a film used these two tent-pole elements so well, combining them to allow its heroine to vicariously speak her "voice-over" through the tent-pole of a "news-flash". All this innovation is utilized for the furtherance of this quietly understated plot rather than just being innovation for innovation's sake. A film (like Beginners) using elements movie-goers have experienced to create an entirely new movie-going experience, Another Earth explores issues of identity and redemption with subtle brilliance.
Another Earth is currently available for a $2.00 first night rental ($1.00 for every succesive night) at your local Blockbuster Express vending machine (which can be found in your local Publix). Before we return to our director's series, I'll be making a post for my Golden Globes picks as they will air on January 15th on NBC. Hope you will all be back for more reading then!
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