This film introduces deep questions about the meaning of life that sophomores with a good liberal education ask each other in the wee hours of the morning. It is a metaphysical excursion that brings ideas like Taoism, Humean Empiricism, Kuhnian paradigms, Foucault's social construction of reality, Alan Moore's view of magic, into a vaguely Buddhist New Age world view, using neurobiology and quantum mechanics as an organizing principle. The movie integrates clips from physicists, philosophers, physicians, theologians with fairly eminent pedigrees (with a few mystics as well) into the story of a photographer named Amanda (played by deaf beauty Marlee Matlin) in the midst of a veritable crisis of existential angst, and her subsequent path to enlightenment.
The film's style--unlike that of this review--attempts to address these ideas using simple vocabulary and graphical metaphor to make the concepts more readily accessible. Computer animated anthropomorphized blood cells illustrate the role of the hypothalamus and neurotransmitters in creating emotion, and multiple Amandas projected onto a basketball court demonstrate quantum superposition. The film ends with a call for a spiritual unity of existence, justified by quantum mechanics, and echoing the Dalai Lama whom I happened to hear speak, last Friday.
For those who somehow missed those sophomoric discussions, or for those with a few gaps in the quite broad range of ideas explored, this film can lead to deeper introspection and new thinking. For me, it revived definitions of existentialism and metaphysics that had lay dormant and un-illustrated in the recesses of my brain, stowed there at some point in high school. Still, by the film's end, its simple treatment feels largely uninspiring and rather superficial. It flits from idea to idea, but nothing coheres. Yet for all the film's detractors, it still has something to recommend. It is innovative and tackles deep memes typically ignored in mass media. For that it deserves commendation.
Final Grade: A-/C+
(pardoxically both at the same time)
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