I was really looking forward to this, since I love Jones and Jackson and McCarthy. I enjoy Shakespeare and philosophy and movies like _My Dinner with Andre_ and _Mindwalk_.
Alas, this movie left me feeling unsatisfied and annoyed. I'll admit right away that I don't have any sympathy for the humdrum bleak existentialist reasoning expressed by White in this movie. If (as he says) the hope of human civilization was extinguished in the gas chambers of Dachau, then it was resurrected in the revolt of Treblinka. If the horrors of the human slave trade and the Middle Passage obliterates the nobility of our species, then Harriet Tubman reorients us to the possibility of ourselves and shows us the true face of prophecy.
Joseph Asagai answers White's pessimism in _A Raisin in the Sun_ by dismissing the notion that he and others like him are "realists". Trapped in a cycle of limited vision and despair, they refuse to see the good and progress of humanity as any kind of counterbalance to the evil, and yet they get to pretend that theirs is the one true honest understanding of who we are. Piffle! With blind Christian faith as the only response to White's solipsistic nihilism, we have a very articulate and entertaining straw man. Throughout the movie I kept imagining worthwhile responses to White's claims, and felt thoroughly discouraged by the inadequacy of Black's dialogue.
I'm glad I saw this movie, but I cannot go along with the glowing perfect-score reviews dished out by my esteemed colleagues on this forum.
Alas, this movie left me feeling unsatisfied and annoyed. I'll admit right away that I don't have any sympathy for the humdrum bleak existentialist reasoning expressed by White in this movie. If (as he says) the hope of human civilization was extinguished in the gas chambers of Dachau, then it was resurrected in the revolt of Treblinka. If the horrors of the human slave trade and the Middle Passage obliterates the nobility of our species, then Harriet Tubman reorients us to the possibility of ourselves and shows us the true face of prophecy.
Joseph Asagai answers White's pessimism in _A Raisin in the Sun_ by dismissing the notion that he and others like him are "realists". Trapped in a cycle of limited vision and despair, they refuse to see the good and progress of humanity as any kind of counterbalance to the evil, and yet they get to pretend that theirs is the one true honest understanding of who we are. Piffle! With blind Christian faith as the only response to White's solipsistic nihilism, we have a very articulate and entertaining straw man. Throughout the movie I kept imagining worthwhile responses to White's claims, and felt thoroughly discouraged by the inadequacy of Black's dialogue.
I'm glad I saw this movie, but I cannot go along with the glowing perfect-score reviews dished out by my esteemed colleagues on this forum.