Blu-Ray Review: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

[Note: I received this disc from Warner Bros. as part of their Blu-Ray Elite program.]

Film

Any movie that opens with an artistic abstraction of a body falling to signify someone jumping from one of the Twin Towers can't hope for greatness, but the shamelessness of Stephen Daldry's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is breathtaking in its outrage. In fairness, it was always going to be this way. An adaptation of the hideous book by Jonathan Safran Foer, the worst, most self-satisfied writer in America today, EL&IC does not so much process the horror of September 11 and its bewildering aftermath through the eyes of a possibly autistic 9-year-old as use this blank protagonist to skirt any sincere approach to the tragedy.

Oskar (Thomas Horn, discovered being robotic and eerily smart on Jeopardy's Kids Week) roams around New York seeking some sense of closure for his father's (Tom Hanks) death in the terrorist attack, especially concerned with finding what his father's mysterious key unlocks. The lad, afraid of subways, runs around the city with a tambourine so that we have something to irritate us when the soundtrack isn't dominated by Horn's monotoned complaints about things that make him nervous. Unable to process emotion, he intrudes upon the turbulent lives of adults dealing with their own issues and presses them to answer his questions. For a movie supposedly about coping with 9/11, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close depicts a disgusting inability to deal with the realities of life and the manner in which banal sorrows do not cease with the occurrence of large-scale travesties.

Steven Spielberg: Minority Report

Filmed from March to July 2001, Minority Report was not influenced by the September 11 attacks later that year, yet retrospectively it seems the first of Steven Spielberg's attempts to grapple with the aftermath of the tragedy. A neo-noir in which crime is committed and prosecuted in the mind, Minority Report proves disturbingly prescient in its vision of a world in which murder is punished preemptively. Though based on an even older Philip K. Dick story, the film feels like the meeting point of the Patriot Act and the impetus for the Iraq invasion, albeit the focus lies not on wars and national defense but mere law enforcement. As the PSAs encouraging support for a national PreCrime system argue to the people, "That which keeps us safe also keeps us free."

Chief John Anderton (Tom Cruise) believes that motto with all his heart. Having lost his son years ago to an unknown kidnapper/murderer, John looks at PreCrime as a way to prevent such pain from afflicting anyone else. Using a trio of genetically engineered psychics to predict when murders will occur and who the perpetrators and victims will be, Anderton and the rest of Washington D.C.'s unit have reduced the murder rate in one of America's most violent cities to zero. The resultant utopia resembles that of Demolition Man: exceedingly bright and almost eerily calm. Only where Demolition Man presented its peace as the product of nanny-state liberalism, Minority Report shows how instant detention has cleared the streets.

Shutter Island

I noticed when I signed into my Blogger account to write this a whopping five posts in a row discussing Martin Scorsese's much-belated B-movie Shutter Island. Given the broad disinterest shown in the bloggers I follow (not to mention myself) concerning the 2010 features released up to this point, I got a kick out of seeing everyone snap to attention. Adding to my amusement was the fact that the miniature excerpts from all five were variations on "Warning: contains spoilers." I plan to cross-review this for my school paper and I'm too lazy to write two entirely separate articles, so I shall avoid spoilers in this review.

Besides, the various twists and turns of Shutter Island just do not matter, and Martin Scorsese knows it. I have heard grumblings through the grapevine that Shutter Island marks Scorsese's attempt to ape twist-master M. Night Shyamalan. This is categorically untrue; if Scorsese wanted the unlocking of the narrative to be the film's ultimate payoff, he would not have telegraphed it from the first minute. Anyone remotely paying attention to the film can and will deduce its ultimate truth by the 10-minute mark, what with the pointed looks and deliberately overacted emphases on certain key phrases such as "defense mechanisms."

What the director does instead is use the messy pulp of Dennis Lehane's novel -- which I have not read but feel confident on the basis of the film saying is far, far, far removed from his usual output, about as far as Shutter Island is from native Boston -- is craft his best film since Gangs of New York, and his most brazenly cinematic since Bringing Out the Dead. Like Scorsese's underrated mid-'80s style-over-substance feature (After Hours), made in direct response to the aborted first attempt to make The Last Temptation of Christ, Shutter Island is Kafkaesque, though not in a particularly deep way. Where After Hours played its psychological mire for laughs, Shutter Island works as a thriller, but the two share a kinship in their display of Scorsese's boundless visual form and the jollies he gets from throwing caution to the wind.

You can see that the director is having a ball from the first frames of the film, as U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonard DiCaprio) converses with his new partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) as they ride a ferry to the titular island. The camera jumps between them as if Godard had sneaked into the editing room, further interrupting these jump cuts with visual asides to Teddy's past, of his wife (Michelle Williams), whom Teddy says died in an apartment fire. The two men are headed to Shutter Island and its mental health facility, Ashecliffe, to investigate a missing patient, whom the doctors say managed to slip through the facility's considerable security measures "as if she evaporated straight through the walls."

For the sake of spoilers, I shall go no further, nor would I feel much inclination to continue following the narrative even if I felt no obligation to protect the mystery for readers. Shutter Island is a giant red herring, and more than that a red herring that flops about and speaks like those awful singing basses that so woefully became the rage around the turn of the millennium when we are all so happy to have survived Y2K that we made some very poor decisions indeed. Unspooling a complicated but hardly complex yarn would suck all the enjoyment out of the movie, as well as the pleasure of discussing it.

What is important, or at least relevant, is how much Shutter Island runs into the open arms of the glory days of the cinema. The overacting, while easily justifiable in retrospect, clearly harks back to the days before Brando tore apart the rulebook, when actors emoted with a capital "E." As an epic psychological thriller, Shutter Island most clearly derives from two sources: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and Powell & Pressburger's Black Narcissus (the nature of the asylum and the overacting found within obviously brings to mind Samuel Suller's Shock Corridor). The sheer cliffs of the island match the rock faces that trapped the nuns in Powell's tripped-out vision of India, while the structure of the film, particularly the camera's alignment with the point-of-view of a detective who wrestles with his own perception, comes straight out of Vertigo.

It also marks a return to Scorsese's best kind of filmmaking, the sort that places his camera into the fractured POV of a warped character. Scorsese hasn't filmed in this style since his final collaboration with Paul Schrader, the criminally underappreciated Bringing Out the Dead, and he hasn't lost his knack for spellbinding shots that you can't always trust, even if he's telling a far simpler tale with Teddy than he did with Travis Bickle, Jake LaMotta or Frank Pierce. Helping matters tremendously is the gorgeous photography by Robert Richardson, who won an Oscar for his work on the director's The Aviator.

Combined with Scorsese's energetic, freewheeling direction, the Powell-influenced cinematography makes for some startling moments. Who could sit there and argue that the film isn't "real" or "deep" enough as Scorsese gives us a horrifying glimpse into Teddy's past as a WWII veteran, a scene framed in the same "movie movie" style as the rest of the picture yet filled with a weight far heavier than the heartstring-tugging content of what's on the screen? And what of the foray into the dreaded Ward C, where the most dangerous psychopaths are kept, its dizzying, rusted metal staircases and walkways resembling a post-industrial version of M.C. Escher's Relativity?

So, yes, Shutter Island is, at its heart, a 140-minute paean to Scorsese's abilities as a visual stylist. But for all of us who guessed the ending before moving out of the first act, how many could have expected the inevitable reveal to be so moving, so like Vertigo in its striking moment of pure empathy between audience and character, even if that moment is forced upon us by the director? Shutter Island could mark an important turning point for the director, who suffered under the yoke of the Weinsteins on Gangs of New York and lost The Departed to Jack Nicholson. Now, with Oscar in hand, Scorsese is confident enough to be himself again, something we haven't seen in years. His long-discussed adaptation of Shusaku Endo's Silence appears at last to be on track, and Scorsese himself asked for the final delay in this film's release to tweak a few more odds and ends in post-production, effectively removing the film from receiving any Oscar attention this year or the next for the sake of making the movie he wanted. Let us hope, then, that Scorsese makes of this decade what Spielberg made of the last one: a period of astonishing late-career creativity by a director who no longer has anything left to prove.

The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)

The importance of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal cannot be overstated. It was not the first film to set off the art-house movement of the '50s (Rashomon did it at the turn of the decade seven years earlier), nor was it even the first of the European art films (the Italian neo-realist scene was already thriving). Nevertheless, it opened up the possibility of serious, philosophical work in cinema. The neo-realist films certainly lacked any melodrama, but their goal, like the Russian constructivist movement before them, stressed fact in their work. While films like Bicycle Thieves certainly contain themes that can applied to all or parts of mankind, The Seventh Seal dealt with philosophy and spirituality directly.

I watched The Seventh Seal about a year ago. The old Criterion copy was rough, with lines and scratches on the film and hisses in the audio. Recently, they used new digital technology to restore the damaged print, and the new Blu-Ray of the film is truly one of the few times I can say without irony that the result is like watching a different film. I couldn't spot a scratch anywhere, and the light hiss was replaced with a solemn quiet in the film's many moments of reflection. What had been a distracting copy was now transformed into the crisp, beautiful work of art it always was.

That is not to say, however, that the film is Bergman's defining masterpiece. Quite the contrary, it clearly displays the auteur's youth and inexperience. Themes are handled too explicitly, and Bergman's affirmation of God's existence seems a touch ironic when the knight Antonius renews his faith at his end when only Death comes to greet him. Nevertheless, it remains a masterpiece, not simply for its importance but because it survives the endless parody and the reams of critical and philosophical debate, and it feels every bit as affecting today as it must have been back then.

That opening scene, of Death coming to claim Antonius Block (Max von Sydow), remains one of the all-time great shots in cinema. Block is returning from the Crusades with his squire Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand), and the atrocities of those wars has shattered Block's faith. He arrives on the shores of his native Sweden to find it covered in the plague. That Death should come in these circumstances is hardly surprising. Block tells the cloaked visage that his body is afraid to die, but he is not. Still, he wishes to see his wife, whom he hasn't seen in 10 years, so he challenges Death to a chess game to buy himself enough time to reach his castle.

Block's protracted game allows him to pass by a number of villages on his way home, all of which are devolving into mass panic from the wave of death sweeping through the country. Weeping men and women cry repents and flagellate themselves as they follow a group of monks. Jöns catches a robber attempting to rape a mute farm girl, only to discover that the man is the same theologian who convinced Block and him to join the Crusades in the first place. That might be the most unsettling implication in the film, though another scene, in which a girl condemned as a witch, who believes that she can see and converse with Satan, works herself into a silent terror at the stake not because of the flames, but because she sees, according to the atheistic and bitter Jöns, neither God nor Satan. She is alone in death, and that is far more terrifying that dying.

Block desperately looks for any sign of good in this terrible world, anything to prove that there is indeed a God, and that his life has not been a waste. If he finds only evil, then what was the point of fighting to spread Christianity? So, he fixates on a family of traveling actors (Nils Poppe and Bibi Andersson) and their newborn son, a picture of innocence in a world gone mad. Block requests that they accompany him to his castle, as much to give him a reminder that it's not all bad as it is to protect them from plague. When he at last does reach home, Death comes to claim everyone inside, and Block prays for help. The mute girl breaks her silence, and the next morning the actor family emerges alive to spot Death leading the knight and his followers in a solemn but slightly joyous dance of death.

For all its existentialist and religious struggles, however, I remain surprised at what a funny film this is. A cuckold finds the actor who stole his wife intent on revenge, but the two enter into nothing more than a shouting match, as Jöns feeds the simple farmer insults. Then it gets even funnier when the actor admits defeat and stabs himself with a prop knife; the farmer and his wife, unfamiliar with acting, believe him to be truly dead. "I was just starting to like him," the farmer moans. Later, that same actor climbs a tree, which Death casually saws down. "I have a performance," the actor feebly offers. "Canceled, on account of death."

That sense of humor and the undercurrent of creative passion make The Seventh Seal an enduring masterpiece even when Bergman went on to bigger and better things. Its affirmation of a God, compared to the almost imperceptible re-awakening of faith in The Silence, is too clunky and facile. Nevertheless, its renewal of faith comes via the realization of a man that some acts give life meaning, and they need not be grand gestures. That is a far better and more intuitive epiphany than a somewhat forced religious affirmation.

Still, the only other film to deal with a crisis of faith so effectively at the time is Carl Dreyer's (admittedly superior) Ordet, made two years earlier. It dealt with lad who appeared crazy because he believed himself to be Jesus, but in the end turned out to unsettle us only because he had true, unwavering faith, and that is frightening to those who don't have it. (Bergman's own Through a Glass Darkly veers closer to this plot than The Seventh Seal). Gunnar Fischer may not be Sven Nykvist, but his cinematography, at last appreciable thanks to Criterion's magnificent re-issue, sets the tone of the film as much as Bergman's contemplative dialogue and plotting. Even in these early stages, Bergman knew a great deal about camera placement and mise-en-scène, and it ensures that The Seventh Seal will live on forever as not just a leap forward in philosophical cinema but one of the most hauntingly beautiful films ever made.

Hannah and Her Sisters

Poor Woody Allen. No matter how many classics he makes, so many will dismiss them as unfunny for not stacking up to the madcap absurdity as such early hits as Sleeper. What so many fail to understand, even among his supporters, is that Allen, though he came to prominence as a stand-up comic, is first and foremost a dramatist. The humor in his work typically comes from his neurosis, an incessant need to point out the flaws in real time and to obsess over them so much that the flaws seem trivial as he makes mountains out of molehills. He and his characters worry so much about the right thing to say that they end up revealing everything they seek to keep hidden, albeit in lofty, philosophical terms.

Such comedy overflows in Hannah and Her Sisters, a film with three major story arcs, all propelled by characters voicing their insecurities and doubts to the audience as they struggle to find some semblance of happiness in their lives. They let us in on their relationship woes, and their awkwardness around members of the opposite sex is funny because it is honest and not exaggerated past the point of believability. Voiceovers shift between typical narrations and internal monologues: in one marvelous scene, Allen's character, a hypochondriac, mulls over the news that a CT scan revealed a spot on his brain and slowly thinks himself into a panic.

Mickey (Allen) is Hannah's (Mia Farrow) ex-, though he's still on reasonable terms with both her and her new husband, Elliot (Michael Caine), whom Mickey likes because he too is under-confident. Hannah is the center of the film, not in the sense that she's the main character and she fuels the narrative but that she is the core about which the stories of others revolve.

Elliot, resentful of his wife's self-sufficiency and success -- she's an actress who just got excellent write-ups for her work in A Doll's House -- leads him to drift away, and soon he finds himself taken with Hannah's sister Lee (Barbara Hershey), who herself is in a failing relationship. Max von Sydow makes a memorable appearance as Lee's ex-, a reclusive artist who shut himself off from everything but Lee, which makes their breakup all the more painful. Caine's performance is surprisingly moving, considering he's engaging in an affair with his wife's sister because he resents how strong she is. He agonizes over how to end his marriage and wait a while before pursuing a real relationship with Lee, to the point of being incapable of thinking of anything else.

Hannah's other sister, Holly (Dianne Wiest) is everything that the level-headed Hannah is not: a recovering coke addict, she runs a catering company with her friend April (Carrie Fisher) while they both hope to land auditions for parts. Though they're friends, the two are always in competition with one another, especially when a smooth-talking, opera-loving guy meets them at a party and takes the two out on the town. She's fiscally reliant on Hannah, something her sister doesn't mind now that it's not going to disappear up Holly's nose but which Holly deeply regrets. Holly's constant failures have left her as neurotic and insular as any of Allen's characters, and she even mentions to Hannah that she, the person nicest to Holly, is the only one who can really make her feel bad about herself.

In contrast to these serious (though often funny) segments, Allen's Mickey provides chunks of comic relief. When that CT scan suggests that the hypochondriac may genuinely have a serious ailment, his internal conversations break into a frenzy, only for the doctors to confirm that nothing is wrong. Now, I often wonder why, in film, someone who loses his faith typically finds it restored after something terrible occurs, but Allen turns it on its head. Receiving miraculous news actually triggers an existential crisis, which leads him to seek religion even though he maintains there's no God. Hilariously, he attempts to convert to Catholicism and mentions their strong moral codes when at the start of the film he, the producer of a sketch comedy show, argues with Standards and Practices for wanting to air a bit about the child molestation charges brought against priests.

Allen practically pioneered the anti-rom-com with Annie Hall, that genre that seeks to actually display love honestly, which severely scales back the laughs to be had into the bitter, real sort that accompanies the pain of relationships. But there is a lighter note to Hannah and Her Sisters, one that might seem contrived in other films but fits naturally here because the characters grow organically. That's what makes Allen -- when he connects -- the most powerful writer in the industry. He can run from laughs to tears, absurdity to stone-faced drama so effortlessly within a single film

Before now, I'd rarely, if ever noticed, Allen's skill with a camera. Gentle tracking shots follow these characters as they pace slowly, mulling over their torment, and his Bergman worship is visible not only in his casting of von Sydow but in his static close-ups that ruminate over the actors' faces that perfectly match their internal dialogue. These shots add aesthetic warmth to this ultimately tender story, and Hannah and Her Sisters must surely rank as one of the director's finest efforts. It reminded me, as Duck Soup did Mickey, that there is something worth living for in this world, and it's art.

Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman, 1963)

Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly remains the weakest film I've yet seen of the director's filmography, which is less a reflection on that movie's quality than the overall brilliance of the rest of them. But that film has a lasting importance -- and a particular relevance to this film -- as the first installment of the Spider trilogy, Bergman's most intimate handling of his struggles with faith. Though there are no narrative and indeed only scant symbolic ties between the previous installment and this second act, Winter Light picks up Kårin's epiphany where it left off and moves forward in time, immersing us in a world of madness.

The first thing that you notice about this film is its stark, realistic photography. Bergman fans of course know this look all too well, but Winter Light marks the first time Bergman and Nykvist completely switched to this style. Through a Glass Darkly pushed the director away from the outright expressionism of such early masterpieces as Wild Strawberries, but there were still moments that hearkened back to the old way of shooting -- the rocky backdrop in particular calls to mind the craggy, intimidating shores of The Seventh Seal. But Winter Light lives up to its name: it's bright, but cold, unfeeling. We see extensive use of the close-ups that would form the bedrock of Nykvist's legacy, probing the characters hard exteriors for any glimpse of emotion or passion. Much of the film takes place in small rooms, only compounding the closed-in feel.

Filling the role of the wayward believer is Tomas Ericsson (Gunnar Björnstrand), a parish priest who delivers his sermons without conviction before a dwindling congregation who themselves are so bored that they only donate spare change. When a young fisherman, Jonas (Max von Sydow), meets with him after the service to discuss his growing despair, the priest dismisses him, sure that he cannot help the lad. Tomas' lover, Märta (Ingrid Thulin), arrives and criticizes his dismissal of Jonas. She gives him a letter, and departs as quickly as she came. As Tomas reads the letter, Bergman treats us to a nearly six-minute unbroken take of a close-up on Märta as she reads the contents aloud. It's practically Ozu-like, and just like Ozu, it's beautiful in its simplicity.

Jonas returns, desperate for guidance. At a loss, Tomas wings it and tells the man of his own experience with God and his time serving as a chaplain in the Spanish Civil War: the priest believed in a benevolent, loving God, but witnessing the various atrocities of wartime shattered his faith. He tells the young man that he saw God for what He really was: "A spider, a monster," echoing Kårin's mad epiphany. In the previous film, the image of God as a spider seemed little more than the hallucination of someone who had truly slipped into insanity; here, that is the cold reality, and to shy away from it, Tomas clings to his old image, the accepted image, of God to keep him together. Here, the two manifestations of Bergman's God have inverted, and the effect is even more unsettling. He then looks the boy in the eye and tells him that the only way to look upon the amorality of the human condition is to deny God, for without Him you no longer need to justify His actions. Jonas leaves dejected, and Tomas turns to face the giant crucifix in the room and declares himself "free."

But freedom offers no solace for the increasingly insular Tomas, and his relationship with Märta does not improve (though she herself is ecstatic about her lover's rejection of God). When she tries to speak to him, he launches into a verbal assault, telling her all the reasons why he does not care for her, ultimately comparing her unfavorably to his late wife. He must also drive out to Jonas' home when the man kills himself after his meeting with the priest. As uncomfortable as Bergman's unyielding close-ups can be, the long shots of Tomas driving to the scene and helping the police to cover the body are utterly chilling, an effect magnified by the near-silence.

Tomas and Märta return to the church for the next service, and find only the organist, Fredrik, and sexton, Algot. Fredrik reveals that Tomas isn't the only broken man in the church when he warns Märta to leave this desolate town before her dreams are crushed like everyone else's. Meanwhile, Algot speaks to the priest about the Passion, and wonders why so many focus on the violence inflicted upon Jesus as terrible torture and not God's silence when His son begged for Him on the cross. Tomas agrees that God's seeming rejection would be far more painful. Algot also mentions the betrayal of the disciples, subtly drawing a connection between their rejection of God and Jesus and Tomas'.

Every Bergman film seems to have, amongst the beautiful and evocative images and dialogue, one scene that sears itself into your memory forever. Usually the moment comes at the end, and here is no exception: after these revealing conversations, Tomas stands at the pulpit and begins his sermon to an empty room. The film earlier suggested a distance between the priest and his parishioners due to the orthodoxy of their practices, but that dogma has at last fully alienated the two groups instead of melding them. As Tomas has rejected God, he is now truly alone in the world.

Winter Light is the director's personal favorite of his works, and it's certainly one of the most daring films he's made short of Persona. Bergman's earlier spiritual forays ended with some sort of reaffirmation, if not necessarily of God then of the spark of the human spirit. But Winter Light ends in a flux: Tomas has flatly rejected God, and it seems to have brought him closer to despair instead of ridding him of his spiritual quandaries. The dialogue about God's silence during Jesus' suffering is particularly telling, and I don't think I deserve kudos for speculating that, just as this film extrapolated upon the imagery of God as a spider, the final installment of the trilogy -- named, wouldn't you know it, The Silence -- will likewise expand upon this. I've never seen a film take so bold a stance on religion, at least not one made by someone who isn't a borderline sociopath on YouTube. With the usual round of excellent acting, stark and beautiful imagery and endlessly layered dialogue, Winter Light stands as one of the great and boldest achievements from a director with perhaps the most daring catalogue of any major filmmaker in history.

Through a Glass Darkly

Much ado has made of Ingmar Bergman's loose trilogy of films that pushed him into the 60s and away from the Baroque expressionism of his early masterpieces into the more personal filmmaker that earned him his legacy. Yes, his two most identifiable films are likely The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, but as a whole we remember Bergman for his more minimalistic works. Through a Glass Darkly, the first of the so-called "Spider Trilogy" (also known as the Silence of God trilogy and the Faith trilogy), is the first example of his transformation into a more introspective filmmaker, and it remains important on that basis even if the film itself has not aged well.

Constructed as a chamber play, Through a Glass Darkly follows a family of 3 men and one woman over the course of 24 hours. The woman, Kårin (Harriet Andersson) has recently been released from an asylum and suffers from an unnamed condition, most likely schizophrenia. Her husband Martin (Max von Sydow) is a doctor who is kind and supportive of his wife but knows he can do nothing to cure her. Meanwhile her father David (Gunnar Bjornstrand), a failed novelist, secretly documents his daughter's illness for his next work. Finally, Minus (Lars Passgård), Kårin's younger brother, must deal with sexual awakening and disturbing feelings for his sister.

From these linked storylines comes a story of isolation, guilt, disappointment and spiritual longing. From the start we see a disconnect between the family; David has been abroad for some time and he gives out tacky presents to his children, who are visibly upset that he thought this meaningless display would impress them. Minus puts on a play that openly mocks his father's work and his aloofness. Martin feels utterly hopeless that he cannot do anything for his wife. That night, Kårin wakes up and goes up to the attic, where she has an episode that leaves her even more fragile.

Kårin's madness leads her to start flirting with Minus, who doesn't know how to respond. Eventually she corners him in the hull of a wrecked ship and it's strongly implied that they have sex (though I've heard an interpretation or two that says Minus is actually a homosexual). We see Minus' internal anguish over his feelings and his utter confusion at how to deal with these new developments. Before all of this, Kårin discovers her father's diary documenting her madness and learns that she'll never be rid of it. Combined with a moment of composure following her seduction of her brother, she asks to return to the hospital for her own good.

The final moments are certainly the most famous of the film, and one of the more memorable scenes I've seen in my (admittedly limited) exposure to Bergman: a helicopter flies overhead and lands to take Kårin back to the asylum, and she goes absolutely mad. She tells her family that she saw God, a "stone-faced spider" who tried to "penetrate" her. When "He" couldn't, the spider crawled up a wall. It leaves her utterly devastated: she spent the whole time waiting for God and, in her mind, was found unworthy. After spending 90 minutes searching for the light of heaven, she puts on sunglasses to block out the light and surrenders to the medics.

That the film continues after this moment with a concluding moment of facile spiritual discussion between David and Minus, in which Minus voices his torment to his father. David, finally concerned about the children to whom he's never shown devotion, reaches out to his son, comforting him with the notion that perhaps God and love are the same thing. It's an obvious moment of the Father finally speaking to the children, and the last line of the film comes from a suddenly reverent Minus: "Papa spoke to me." Even if it wasn't a sappy way to equate David's moment with his son as a connection between God and humans, it still brings down the shattering power of Kårin's final scene.

In his essay for the Criterion DVD, Peter Matthews offers an interpretation of God as a spider: to him, Bergman is saying "the pious consolations of the past no longer suffice in the era of Auschwitz and the atomic bomb." This film and its resultant "trilogy" would examine Bergman's spiritual doubt in the face of such travesties, and this doubt forms an endlessly complex existential drama that is not handled quite properly in this installment. However, the confessional tone of the film, particularly Bergman's harsh appraisal of David's--and therefore his own--art (perhaps he saw the same exploitative side in himself as he did in David) redeems the film. Supposedly Bergman himself came to view his ending as facile and tacked-on, and his subsequent entries in the trilogy reflect more of Kårin's nihilism than the too-cheap message of hope.

What struck me from the start was the tiny island where Bergman filmed the movie. Rocky landscapes and a general feeling of isolation do more to establish the mood of the story than any acting ever could. The film cemented Bergman's collaboration with cinematographer Sven Nykvist, whose stark and realistic photography contrasts beautifully with the existential and symbolist drama of the story. Bergman and Nykvist would continue to work together for the rest of their lives (Nykvist died before Bergman made his final film, Saraband), and the two form arguably the most famous and most rewarding director-cinematographer team in film history. Here, Nykvist uses the crags and bleak sea surrounding the island to underline each character's emotional isolation and their hardened outlook towards God.

So what do we have in the end? A good film, certainly, one that even has hints of greatness. Yet that greatness is tempered by moments of heavy-handedness and outdated notions of mental illness. Through a Glass Darkly is the third Bergman film I've seen (the other two being The Seventh Seal and Scenes From a Marriage), and it's certainly the least of these three, but I can also see it building the bridge between Seventh Seal and Scenes. I'm glad I watched it, and it's left me with a burning desire to move straight into the other two films of the trilogy, but this is one of those classics worth it more for historic or artistic importance than genuine brilliance.