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Originally Posted by sparky
People are very different when it comes to these kind of things. There are plenty of people who probably won't have the same visceral reaction I did. Those who connect with it the way I did will say masterpiece, but most everyone else will say merely great.
I can understand my own response pretty well. So much of that landscape and imagery are familiar to me. The characters too. It really pushed a lot of my buttons, most powerfully in terms of the tone. In some odd way, and this is simply a connection I have with the way Lee directs, the pacing, the framing, and the ambience of the movie evokes the way my brain constructs memories. It felt extremely intimate and personal to me, my experience, and the style in which my imagination works.
The fact that the two main characters do not share a great amount of dialogue also worked for me. The film doesn't have a lot of dialogue, period.
So much of what was communicated was communicated visually, and the images that were chosen were extremely evocative and memorable to me. The more things I see, hear, and experience...the more I am finding that certain kinds imagery and careful, quiet storytelling have the most impact on me. It is in near silence and stillness that some of the most compelling things in life happen. Lee captures that. There was also a lack of sentimentality that, for me, makes all the difference.
It is perhaps an intensely personal and particular vantage point that enabled me to understand the relationship between these characters and feel the depth of it. The outdoors, the things they did together, the stillness between them...it spoke volumes to me. But not everyone is going to get that, I suppose. They were scenes that could have been pulled out my life. Characters that I have known. That is a familiarity not everyone is going to have. I do not think it detracts from the success of the film, however. I believe the original writer of the story, the screenwriters, and the director all understood the way the two men thought, and the way they related to each other. The scarcity of their time together, the intimacy of the wilderness, all of this enhanced the intensity of it for me. The very scarcity of a precious item is part of what enhances its value. I guess that I felt that way about the character of Ennis. We all have known a few people who rarely say much. But when they do ? Every word counts. When you are with them, every second counts. I felt the film makers conveyed this sense of gravity and power. It is a language that was natural, familiar, and effective to me.
And that is probably part of why it impacted me the way it did.
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