Departures

February 28th, 2010Blog0 comments

I make it a point now to watch movies that A) I know are going to be good, and B) I know nothing about. All I was getting from the poster of Departures was that it involved a guy playing a cello with a little nature in the background. Plus this pic won an Academy Award for best foreign film. Sounds promising, right?

Simply said, Departures is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a great film to study if you’re a structuretard like me. The story is almost perfectly balanced from beginning to end, plus the protagonist’s transformation tracks clearly and poignantly.

A mark of a good movie is seeing how a protagonist is able to resolve a conflict at the end of the story that he couldn’t possibly be able to resolve at the beginning. He/she is afraid or broken or lacking in skill/energy/capability to confront the crisis. So there needs to be a fundamental change in his/her inner nature in order to allow him/her to confront and overcome the conflict. Usually a balance of some sort needs to be achieved. This transformation shows that there has been a clear sense of evolution and growth in the character.

Departures takes that idea and executes it brilliantly. The man that we see at the beginning of the story is a very different man in the end. The movie also reveals a lot about Japanese culture and its views on death — and there are many parallels here to how Americans deal with the subject as well. I.E., nobody likes it, but we can choose to deal with it with class and respect.

See it. It’s touching and it unwraps neatly and in an interesting way. Also the main character’s wife is cute and she has a baby voice. This is kind of comforting in its own way.