End Of The Road

Learning to share your essential self is never hackneyed.

Seeking A Friend For The End of the World (2012) is being categorized by the lazy movie reviewing press as a quirky romance with an odd setting, but it is really a road movie, in the mode of The Road and Zombieland, both fine examples of the genre.  (Heck, the old guy Homer made something pretty good out of the form in The Odyssey.)

The essence of the form is the voyage of self-discovery.  The protagonist should have a clear, specific stated goal, but in the best road stories, that evolves into a pretext, and is sometimes abandoned altogether.  Carell's Dodge (convenient name for a man who has dodged relationships?) and Knightley's Penny (who lets people devalue her) both need to see some people before the world ends (and hats off to writer-director Lorene Scafaria for not hedging that one -- it's never in doubt that the world is going to end). But they find other things on the way, naturally.  I suppose it would be obvious that they found each other, but that doesn't feel as obvious and pre-destined as it does in most films of this kind.  (Remember The Sure Thing back in the 80s?)

In this case, some goals are achieved, some abandoned, and some are discarded.  What keeps it from being predictable might be attributed to Steve Carell's nose and Keira Knightley's teeth.  Both of them are a little "off" as romantic objects, and that helps to maintain the author's intended misdirection.  (Yes, I know Knightley can be cleaned up to be stunning, but she doesn't have to look that way all the time, which is an advantage for an ambitious actress.)  I would even dispute that they are even a romantic match in this movie.  What they are is valuable companions when companionship is really needed.

And if the structure is a bit picaresque, rambling or even just plain arbitrary, well, how organized do you expect the end of the world to be?

The best reason to see this film, especially with someone who is important to you is in order to lead into that conversation about what you yourself would do given a limited time left.  I might want to be lying face to face with my SO, but I might want to be on that enchanting beach (shown in the picture above) with dozens of people and their children laughing and playing music and eating and being baptized and enjoying being alive and by the ocean and with each other and having been alive before they were dead.  That seems like an awfully good idea, and part of me wishes the movie had simply ended there.

They don't make them like this anymore...

...which is not an unalloyed blessing. Scarecrow (1973) is the kind of rambling, acting-driven, somewhat indulgent project which, if done at all nowadays, is made independently. But coming fresh off The French Connection and The Godfather, this is what Gene Hackman and Al Pacino chose to do (and what the Warner Bros. of that time was happy to finance and distribute), to remind the world that they were actors, and not merely puppets dancing for the master filmmakers.

They play two ex-con drifters making a feckless journey, ostensibly to Pittburgh, where Hackman claims to have the means to open a car wash they can run together. They don't get there. That's about the whole plot.

Scarecrow doesn't even really show its stars doing what they do best--they seem to have reversed roles for the heck of it. Hackman is a rather sour party-pooper and Pacino is a goofball clown. Given the length of the film and the lack of narrative drive, this wears thin before very long. The director and screenwriter have neglected to provide alternative textures, so it is Gene and Al all the way. Gene wants to do something practical, Al acts wacky, Gene gets mad, tries to do something practical, Al acts wacky, and so on and so on.

However, if you are curious about the film, but want to save time, start at about the 1:30 point (the entire film is about 1:50). The clip above is from this portion of the film. Just before the portion you see, Pacino's bitter ex-wife has lied to him, telling him that the son he has never seen was in fact never born. See Pacino's character's natural humanity turn and sour on him, as Hackman must now adopt the role of caretaker.

I am sure everyone involved in the film was the better for making it, but I'm not sure what the rest of us gained, except certainty that these men had a lot of good work ahead of them.