Review of Visioneers (2008) by Mark D — 07 Mar 2010

I just came across this movie somewhere, then looked for ratings and reviews, to see it gets quite a slating from a bunch of people, and no high ratings, but reading about it and watching a trailer intrigued me, so I tried it; plus I'm finding out more and more that other people's ratings can be meaningless, even if many, many people don't like something.

Though there are plain ways to fault this film, though at the same time I guess that raises the question of how much people may tend to refer to concepts and facets they can list, and whether something 'ticks the boxes' of that list. Too much I've seen cinema jargon bandied about in criticism, when basically I couldn't give a shit as long as the whole moves me in some way, just the same with music. Even if it seriously 'fails' to get technical or procedural things right, or to include aspects of what generally is considered to make good work. I like Black Flag a lot more than I like Yngwie Malmsteen. Maybe that kind of approach shows in my response to movies too.

But, anyway, yes, there's quite a simple idea put across here: of a dehumanising, 'productivity'-driven society coming into conflict with the internal world of the human 'cogs' who make up its workings. This includes also the 'stress relieving' industry that accompanies that situation; entertainment, self-help, touchy-feeliness and sugary sweet smily obsequiouness between people, etc., etc. There are probably no metaphors, at least not subtle ones, it's all made pretty plain. That obviousness is something that I'm sure many people wouldn't warm too, and I wasn't sure what to make of it myself.

Of course there's also the simple fact of its slow-moving and understated approach, which many wouldn't like, even if in every other way it was subtle, clever and 'ticked all the right boxes'.

And there's that style, quite fashionable in recent years, of understated, kind of dull, expressionless, quiet, fumbling characters, stemming from an attempt to show up our more banal reality as people, and of our lives, but perhaps being sometimes overdone for the sake of it. I'm sure some people see this and are tired of it.

But here the simple continuous focus on that plain dullness of this life lived for unreal achievement, and the cardboard quality of people, and the underlying feeling of frustration, that results, feels right to me. That it's done in a simple and obvious, and perhaps not revolutionarily novel way (these days at least, a decade or so ago it would have been) doesn't really matter to me. And that said, there are little quirks about things that happen, and the way the world is shown, that are nonetheless unique in their own small way, even if they seem familiar. The teddy bears, the levels in the office, the 'solar system hat', pole vaulting, the way people greet each other, etc.

But things just seemed subtly evocative all the same, despite seeming obviousness. Firstly it's not some wild dystopian future, but just a notch away from our own reality, and although it's taken to a level that is kind of absurd, and makes it all too obvious, that fact in unison with the fact that it's somehow all too familiar gave it power to me. Maybe you could say it shows up our predicament by showing that you don't need to take too many things too much further before it all starts looking very silly. I was reminded of little things, like how, more than a decade ago, I discussed with a member of 'lower management' somewhere I worked that they were wrong to think that employees would, or should, be proud to wear t-shirts with their employer's logo on it, and how those words were met with incomprehension. Also how I met someone who a little later felt compelled to point out their employer's billboard somewhere and to tell me how proud their 'collective' was to have been successful in business lately. Or how I keep seeing young people in the supermarket who are so proud of their money, their phones, their cool clothes, their perceived status. And those meathead guys who don't feel any real worth in themselves unless they have a car, and the right one. How dead is that?

All this being fooled and pulled in by all this shit, and all this clinging to false senses of fulfillment, of being even, and all these dull feelings of confused longing that arise in anyone with some semblance of sanity, but how disturbing it is that that often seems rare. These may seem like obvious and well-worn ideas, but it's all still there, and it's all still so invisible to so many, maybe to all of us. And that makes me think that there's something here in how we're shown the obvious, but it points us at how it's maybe in many things that are not so obvious, that maybe we should look deeper. They don't show us deeper here, although the 'hippies' who think they've broken out, and who the authorities repress, are shown to be 'just entertaining themselves' just like everyone else, and not really so free, but that doesn't close the question. I wonder if people don't see much in this film because they don't feel how the obvious 'lostness' of its characters in the shit they lose themselves in relates to them, that it just seems some dumb obvious shit that no-one should fall for, and don't feel that it's hinting that a lot else, not so obvious, is just as shit, and we're just as lost in it. For example, our idea that we're engaging in art in some meaningful way, and asserting something deep in ourselves, with all this 'film-buffery' and 'music loving', when it turns so easily into anal collecting (even if not physically) and conforming to standards and demands of society all the same.

I guess maybe that's it. In its blunt ways this film touches on a feeling, a similar feeling to what was evoked in Fight Club, and it just hammers at it, plainly and continuously, but its a feeling worth awaking and hammering at, until we realise we have it too, somewhere, and maybe in relation to far less obvious situations, and that we're as ineffectual as the characters here.

That's just made me realise that there are 3 films I've liked over recent months that others have rated very low (though also they seem to elicit mixed responses, with both low and high marks, though low on average, though seemingly rising over time, slowly). One is this one, one is 'Cold Souls' and one is 'You, Me and Everone We Know'. All of them have this understated, not-thrust-upon-you style, where emotions are not clear, and motivations are left very 'ghostly', vague, fuzzy, dulled and muddled, like everyone is feeling some need, but can't place it, and can't decide how, or whether, to act on it, and all of them take a simple approach of gradually and simply focusing and focusing and focusing on that one simple central 'vibe' and leaving you with it. Is that bad? Is its 'simplicity' a problem? I've already evoked the Ramones in a review as an example of how simple focus can be such a good thing. I'm not sure that analogy fits so well here, but maybe. Who's the expert?