THE FLOORS ARE THERE TO WALK OVER, THE WALLS ARE THERE TO CLIMB: Movie reviews. My Netflix had a theme again, as I watched Brief Encounter immediately followed by The Squid and the Whale–a double dose of domestic despair.

Brief Encounter was–unexpectedly–harder to watch. It’s an adultery drama from 1945, dir. David Lean. The lead actress, Celia Johnson, is pretty excellent, although to be honest all she’s asked to do is stare at the camera with a look of repressed misery. But I loved her huge-eyed, oddly lumpy and jawy face. She looked raw.

None of the other actors struck me at all, though the final scene was very poignant.

My main problem, watching the movie, I think was a culture-clash problem. I was strongly reminded of the Chris Ware line from Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Boy on Earth—

But with the inevitable forward march of progress
come new ways of hiding things,
and new things to hide.

Because we lie to ourselves differently now, it was easy to feel that the narrator of Brief Encounter was being willful and stupid to a degree and in a way which I found totally unsympathetic. Her self-deception tricks felt alien to me, and so it was hard to feel like I was implicated in her actions. I kept thinking of the New X-Men issue “Some Angels Falling,” which showed the same stages of an affair in a way which struck me as less mannered (though obviously even more genre-bound!), more queasily familiar, and therefore more powerful, more of an indictment, a plot in which I was much more complicit. (This might also be related in some way to my reaction to The Ring as vs. Ringu–?)

I liked the heavy-handed use of Rachmaninoff, though I can see how someone else might find it soggy.

The Squid and the Whale I found completely compelling and watchable, despite the fact that it’s basically about four truly horrible and/or wretched people, in large part because their particular varieties of horribleness did feel so familiar. The teenager, especially, was skin-crawlingly close to home.

It’s basically a soapier version of (some aspects of) Elizabeth Marquardt’s Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce, which you should read, translated directly onto the screen. There were occasional plot elements I found overdone (although for all I know they’re taken from life–that doesn’t get you a pass) but overall yeah, I’d recommend this.