Word: film
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...Reygadas sets Silent Light's agenda in the first moments. The film opens with a nearly five-minute time-lapse shot of night sky, stars, dawn slowly breaking and finally full daylight, as the sound track comes alive with loud crickets, braying and mooing, and breathy, muffled screams. Brilliant sunshine bathes the kitchen of a Mennonite farm as the family takes morning prayer in a silence broken only by the loud ticking of a clock. Esther (Miriam Toews), the mother, raises her eyes; Johan (Cornelio Wall Fehr), the father, says, "Amen"; and the children dive wordlessly into their cereal. After...
...place the land's natural beauty against the internal conflicts of the three main participants. The director also constructs elaborate pairs of sequences, one toward the beginning of Silent Light, the other toward the end. The opening dawn is the prelude to the closing dusk (which consumes the film's last five minutes); a church service precedes a wake; a passionate kiss of love is followed by the restorative kiss of life...
...this is not merely attention to visual and behavioral detail; it is a consummate film artist's conjuring of a world and its inhabitants. Reygadas elicits strong performances from his amateur cast of Mennonites, whose cowboy hats, plain speaking and ease in inhabiting their sagebrush environment give them the stature of western-movie archetypes. They support the filmmaker's genius for sanctifying each moment: the milking of cows and harvesting of grain, the children being washed in a stream, a rush through a cornfield for a sweetly illicit tryst, the sobbing of a woman in the forest in the rain...
...owes its mild success to Anne Hathaway, who makes it watchable. After seeing Bride Wars' marketing campaign, I wondered whether Hathaway would hurt her hopes of an Oscar nomination for Rachel Getting Married by appearing in such lightweight fare right around ballot time. (Rachel may get married, but that film indulges no fantasies.) Instead, Bride Wars is a reminder that Hathaway can be soulful and charming no matter how mundane her surroundings. She manages her appealing vulnerability with expertise, but she's also learned how to blend in just enough sexuality to put those Princess Diaries days behind...
...Hudson, who co-produced the film, fares less well. Sporting bangs so long they seem poised for an attack on the rest of her face, she appears oddly aged. Her Liv has the brittle, hard quality of a Kim Cattrall. It's distracting; my inner voice kept muttering, "What has Kate Hudson done with her freshness? It should not be used up at 29!" Perhaps a diet of strictly romcom fare is no healthier for movie stars than it is for audiences. Still, Hudson does win the bridal wars in one sense: when it comes to The Dress...