Film effrayant et stupide où Mortensen joue un père insupportablement pédant qui a lavé le cerveau de ses enfants et en tire une satisfaction béate. Il faut attendre une heure dix-sept pour que cette façade de condescendance et de contentement de soi craquelle. La crise existentielle dure à peu près cinq minutes, Mortensen acceptant les compromis qui s'imposent et un charmant petit cottage de la part de ses beaux-parents richissimes, avec qui il s'est bien sûr entretemps réconcilié.
Un avis parmi d'autres qui dit peu ou prou la même chose sur imdb :
Citation:
I don't want to dwell on the acting, camera and other cinematic stuff. The cast are your usual fare of beautiful Hollywood people, camera and direction are not jarringly obvious, so they must be O.K. too. The only problem this movie has, is the atrocious script.
The premise of the movie is a family living in a kind of Thoreau-esque paradise of unity of Man and Nature, hunting (and presumably gathering, we are not shown this explicitly) and not having to interact with the nasty, philistine and obese Christians inhabiting the rest of the country.
The most jarring thing about the movie it its total lack of self-awareness. The protagonists ride through the whole thing on their high horses without a single character pointing out the obvious flaws in their reasoning:
The basic tenor of the plot is the superiority of the enlightened individualism to the organized religion (Christianity specifically, the other monotheist religions are beyond pale, of course). However, the family unit that is the central protagonist of the movie resembles a sect tightly controlled by its charismatic leader more than any mainstream Christian church does.
In the important scene in the movie, the Father of the family demonstrates the superiority of his education by having his small child giving a discourse on the Bill of Rights and Citizens United verdict. The 'normal' people are dutifully dumbfounded and ashamed of themselves. However, it's safe guess that the children in the family have no clue who's princess Lea, what's Facebook {or any computer technology for that matter), they also lack basic social skills. You can judge for yourself what kind of knowledge is useful IRL.
The happy family celebrate a Noam Chomsky day after successful grocery store heist. You can think what you want about Mr. Chomsky's policies, but extreme individualism is hardly something that he would endorse.
The proud Father snarkily comments that the 'Business of America is business' to demonstrate the soulless nature of capitalistic society. However, this is a quote from Calvin Coolidge, one of the presidents with actual survival skills.
Extreme individualism and survival skills is something the proud Father boasts about to his weakling sister-in-law. However, hunting and gathering can support about 1 person per square mile. So if USA should revert to this way of living, about 98% of the population would have to be eliminated.
And finally and most importantly, even their small family is totally dependent on the broader society. They don't have blast furnaces to produce steel to create their nice hunting knifes. Practical outdoor clothing they wear was probably manufactured in China, using technologies and materials that were not available not even fifty years ago. When one of the children is injured, they rush him to modern hospital to take advantage of the state-of-the-art medical facilities.
So the movie's most pervasive feature is its monumental hypocrisy. Yeah, let the other people live their meaningless petty lives in the thrall of multinational corporations and subjugated by organized religion. We shall take the fruits of your labors, laugh at your travails and feel smugly superior about ourselves.
Qu'on puisse
sérieusement trouver un quelconque intérêt, comme dans les avis plus haut, est inquiétant. Je conseille aux plus avisés de se rabattre sur
The Mosquito Coast ou A
bout de course. Hé, je suis sûr le Cédric Kahn avec Kassovitz est plus intéressant sur un sujet similaire.
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