Well, just about every kind of quirk you might expect to find in a nice Jewish academic family in Berkeley is tucked away somewhere in this leisurely trip through misunderstandings.
Richard Gere, gone white and looking great, does most of the talking and most of the moving. He teaches Hebrew Studies, he coaches his son on the cello, he always cooks dinner at home. (Pretty liberated, eh?) Now Gere isn't frenetic as he sometimes has been, as in, say, "Power". His buzzing activity mostly stands out because nobody else has much of it.
His wife, Juliette Binoche, has lost her family and wanders around with all the substance of a wisp of smoke. It turns out she's covering up some quirky activities, even for a family like this. She has a garage full of broken trinkets she's collected from other people's properties. They hang from the ceiling in a multitude of sparkling threads, tinkling a little bit, as Gere discovers them and goggles at the sight.
Then there's the son, Aaron. Gere is a devoutly religious man who would like to be a mystic but is reduced to merely studying Jewish mysticism. But the son? Well, he's a whiz on the cello. With a father like Gere you could hardly be other than a whiz at whatever he urged you to try. And Aaron is searching for God too. But where does he find God? In the now-defunct Hare Krishnas. Of course it could have been worse. Aaron might have dug up some suicide cult. But still, for some people it must be getting a bit tiresome to deal with people who have learned that God is communicating with them. Andy Warhol once claimed that he'd been given a dead phone but that God was supposed to be on the other end waiting for his call. Warhol never made the call because he could never think of anything to say. Doctor Fielgut's advice is this: Do find God, if you can, but then whatever he tells you keep it to yourself.
Oh, yes. Then there's the little daughter, reserved, soft, vulnerable, unamazing in any way until she discovers that she has some form of synesthesia regarding words. When she hears "cotyledon" defined, she closes her eyes and is swirled about with leaves. When Gere finds this out -- WOW! TWO geniuses in the family, not including him and Juliette Binoche who is "a scientist." Aaron and his cello are put on the back burner while Gere hovers over his daughter and tells her emphatically that God is in the letters. In the end she teaches him a valuable lesson too, humility.
There's something distasteful about judged performances like spelling bees though. I say this not only because Barbara Lukashinsky came in first, to my second, in a fifth-grade spelling bee, just because I misspelled a stupid word like "nickel" and she got it right. No, it's not that at all, even though she didn't deserve first prize.
It's that like other judged performances, spelling bees are a zero-sum game. One can only "win" at the expense of someone else. It's competition in its purest form. You win the prize by beating everyone else. But who wins a prize for cooperation? Or self sacrifice? Roger Bannister was the first person to run a 4-minute mile. Does anyone remember who was the second runner to break four minutes? It isn't that competition is necessarily bad per se. It can boost team solidarity and even be fun. The main problem with spelling bees is that they encourage lazy, categorical thinking about either "victory" or "defeat", while "compromise" has no part in the contest.
This is a pretty slow movie. It's almost European. It's stuffed with far too many themes, like the kaleidoscope (did I spell that right?) that Binoche hands down to daughter Emily. Impossible to grasp them all. But it's a nice change to see a film that challenges us.
Richard Gere, gone white and looking great, does most of the talking and most of the moving. He teaches Hebrew Studies, he coaches his son on the cello, he always cooks dinner at home. (Pretty liberated, eh?) Now Gere isn't frenetic as he sometimes has been, as in, say, "Power". His buzzing activity mostly stands out because nobody else has much of it.
His wife, Juliette Binoche, has lost her family and wanders around with all the substance of a wisp of smoke. It turns out she's covering up some quirky activities, even for a family like this. She has a garage full of broken trinkets she's collected from other people's properties. They hang from the ceiling in a multitude of sparkling threads, tinkling a little bit, as Gere discovers them and goggles at the sight.
Then there's the son, Aaron. Gere is a devoutly religious man who would like to be a mystic but is reduced to merely studying Jewish mysticism. But the son? Well, he's a whiz on the cello. With a father like Gere you could hardly be other than a whiz at whatever he urged you to try. And Aaron is searching for God too. But where does he find God? In the now-defunct Hare Krishnas. Of course it could have been worse. Aaron might have dug up some suicide cult. But still, for some people it must be getting a bit tiresome to deal with people who have learned that God is communicating with them. Andy Warhol once claimed that he'd been given a dead phone but that God was supposed to be on the other end waiting for his call. Warhol never made the call because he could never think of anything to say. Doctor Fielgut's advice is this: Do find God, if you can, but then whatever he tells you keep it to yourself.
Oh, yes. Then there's the little daughter, reserved, soft, vulnerable, unamazing in any way until she discovers that she has some form of synesthesia regarding words. When she hears "cotyledon" defined, she closes her eyes and is swirled about with leaves. When Gere finds this out -- WOW! TWO geniuses in the family, not including him and Juliette Binoche who is "a scientist." Aaron and his cello are put on the back burner while Gere hovers over his daughter and tells her emphatically that God is in the letters. In the end she teaches him a valuable lesson too, humility.
There's something distasteful about judged performances like spelling bees though. I say this not only because Barbara Lukashinsky came in first, to my second, in a fifth-grade spelling bee, just because I misspelled a stupid word like "nickel" and she got it right. No, it's not that at all, even though she didn't deserve first prize.
It's that like other judged performances, spelling bees are a zero-sum game. One can only "win" at the expense of someone else. It's competition in its purest form. You win the prize by beating everyone else. But who wins a prize for cooperation? Or self sacrifice? Roger Bannister was the first person to run a 4-minute mile. Does anyone remember who was the second runner to break four minutes? It isn't that competition is necessarily bad per se. It can boost team solidarity and even be fun. The main problem with spelling bees is that they encourage lazy, categorical thinking about either "victory" or "defeat", while "compromise" has no part in the contest.
This is a pretty slow movie. It's almost European. It's stuffed with far too many themes, like the kaleidoscope (did I spell that right?) that Binoche hands down to daughter Emily. Impossible to grasp them all. But it's a nice change to see a film that challenges us.