I have noticed that people have raised issue about this film being an authentic representation of the nature of autism. While it does touch upon the subject, I agree with those who insist that this is not primarily a story about autism, but more about grief and how to communicate with it in a way that leads to healing. Children and adults sometimes feel things so deeply and intensely that a means of expression is bewilderingly hard to find. This film is about this in essence. A mother takes almost infinite pains to regain contact with her daughter who appears to be drifting into disappearance around the far side of the moon.
Kathleen Turner provides us with yet another dimension to her impressive range as an actress. There is not a hint of the femme fatale from BODY HEAT (1981) or the mousy novelist Joan Wilder of ROMANCING THE STONE (1984) here. We see Turner plumbing her maternal nature for all it is worth as the self assertive, concerned mother Ruth Matthews. She is as believable and convincing here as she was in her previous roles. This is a more mature slice of her as a successful and winning woman managing a family as a newly minted widow.
After the experience of having her husband fall to his death in an ancient archeological ruin, she finds the tragedy affects her son and daughter in different ways. Michael played by Shiloh Strong, appears to be attempting to adapt, while Ruth's daughter Sally as played by Asha Menina, retreats into a world of silence occasionally interrupted by humming shrieks. Sally's response to the loss of her father mirrors certain characteristics associated with autism, and Ruth fears she may lose her daughter to this profoundly uncharted and unknown world. After witnessing her daughter dramatize this new and odd behavior in life threatening incidents, she becomes involved with Tommy Lee Jones as Jake Beerlander, an expert in child autism. He demonstrates a few effective methods for managing Sally's random outbursts of emotion, while Ruth insists all the while that her daughter is not truly autistic.
One of the things that is not mentioned very much by any of the reviewers is the art de object from which the film takes its name. This is a beautiful spiraling piece of cinema stirringly set to music by James Horner. The visual construction arrests the mind from all the maundering psycho-babble and captures perfectly the wonder and the whimsy of a child's world reaching out to express itself. It reminds us of one of the purposes of true art, which is to express the inexpressible. It is a swooping, soaring highlight in the film just this side of a Rube Goldberg machine or a kinetic sculpture. As a moment of pure movie magic, it more than pays for itself.
Ruth takes inspiration from Sally's angst-ridden creative outpouring of colors and shapes bounded in the architectonics of her lonely effort to renew contact with her departed father. She proposes to duplicate her daughter's striving for a spiritual reunion with the tools and materials she has learned to manipulate in the professional adult world. Soon both mother and daughter are walking up and through a new archeological ruin to find a new key to their lives. Searching for the lost man on the moon through a kind of myth and waking dream just this side of a nightmare the two seem to arise and arrive out of the drenching waters of grief to a needful awakening. Jake Beerlander stands below them on the sidelines in puzzled wonderment as Ruth and her daughter and family make peace with the past.
Kathleen Turner provides us with yet another dimension to her impressive range as an actress. There is not a hint of the femme fatale from BODY HEAT (1981) or the mousy novelist Joan Wilder of ROMANCING THE STONE (1984) here. We see Turner plumbing her maternal nature for all it is worth as the self assertive, concerned mother Ruth Matthews. She is as believable and convincing here as she was in her previous roles. This is a more mature slice of her as a successful and winning woman managing a family as a newly minted widow.
After the experience of having her husband fall to his death in an ancient archeological ruin, she finds the tragedy affects her son and daughter in different ways. Michael played by Shiloh Strong, appears to be attempting to adapt, while Ruth's daughter Sally as played by Asha Menina, retreats into a world of silence occasionally interrupted by humming shrieks. Sally's response to the loss of her father mirrors certain characteristics associated with autism, and Ruth fears she may lose her daughter to this profoundly uncharted and unknown world. After witnessing her daughter dramatize this new and odd behavior in life threatening incidents, she becomes involved with Tommy Lee Jones as Jake Beerlander, an expert in child autism. He demonstrates a few effective methods for managing Sally's random outbursts of emotion, while Ruth insists all the while that her daughter is not truly autistic.
One of the things that is not mentioned very much by any of the reviewers is the art de object from which the film takes its name. This is a beautiful spiraling piece of cinema stirringly set to music by James Horner. The visual construction arrests the mind from all the maundering psycho-babble and captures perfectly the wonder and the whimsy of a child's world reaching out to express itself. It reminds us of one of the purposes of true art, which is to express the inexpressible. It is a swooping, soaring highlight in the film just this side of a Rube Goldberg machine or a kinetic sculpture. As a moment of pure movie magic, it more than pays for itself.
Ruth takes inspiration from Sally's angst-ridden creative outpouring of colors and shapes bounded in the architectonics of her lonely effort to renew contact with her departed father. She proposes to duplicate her daughter's striving for a spiritual reunion with the tools and materials she has learned to manipulate in the professional adult world. Soon both mother and daughter are walking up and through a new archeological ruin to find a new key to their lives. Searching for the lost man on the moon through a kind of myth and waking dream just this side of a nightmare the two seem to arise and arrive out of the drenching waters of grief to a needful awakening. Jake Beerlander stands below them on the sidelines in puzzled wonderment as Ruth and her daughter and family make peace with the past.