Word: sonly
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Buckley died just 10 months after his wife Patricia, who was 80. Their son Christopher has written a memoir of that difficult year titled Losing Mum and Pup (Twelve; 251 pages). Christopher--as we will call him to avoid muddling our Buckleys--is best known as a comic novelist (Thank You for Smoking, Supreme Courtship), and in taking on such a tragic, personal subject, he's punching well above his weight class. But his sense of the absurd turns out to be oddly well suited to observing the numerous medical and existential indignities associated with dying, as well...
...movie does establishes a standard scenario for a psychological thriller: a therapist (Willem Dafoe) attempts to help his grieving wife recover from the death of their two-year-old son by taking her to the isolated cabin in a Washington state forest called Eden, where she had spent the previous summer with the boy while writing a thesis, never completed, on the medieval persecution of women as witches. From the midpoint on, as the director's plot summary tactfully puts it, "things go from bad to worse." Worse than you, or almost anyone but von Trier, could imagine...
...white images rendered in slo-mo, and to a soprano's lofty rendition of Handel's Lascia ch'io pianga ("Leave me to weep over my cruel fate"), a couple makes love on a snowy evening. In another room the washing machine churns. In a third, the couple's son Nic escapes his crib to, and goes to a window ledge where he teeters, then falls to his death. The sex act, Nic's life and the wash conclude simultaneously. The child's last moment has a beauty to match its horror: as he lands there's the splash...
...grief, while He (Dafoe) tries all his trade's tricks to ease her back to mental health. Returning home doesn't help; She is haunted by the child's room, his playthings, his absence. Already, though, an attentive viewer wonders if the parents set the wrong tone for their son, since, on a table by the playpen, they've placed three metal statuettes labeled Pain, Grief and Despair. These figures will recur, in the forms of a deer, a fox and a crow, as the woman's grip on sanity loosens and she becomes a danger to herself...
...shoes put on the wrong feet, and, in one of several allusions to The Shining, a thesis notebook whose pages reveal handwriting that grows less coherent and into scrawls - the director deftly drops hints of madness in its early bloom. The woman is driven bonkers by grief at her son's death, but she may have been heading for the daft side months before...