recommended

Absolutely Fantastic

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

_Loved_ was written and directed by Erin Dignam. Produced by Sean Penn, who makes a great cameo appearance early in the story as a schizoid character who desperately asks for emotional help from a lawyer-cum-psychologist played by William Hurt. The Penn character disappears after this brief speech about how we're all magnets attracting and repelling each other, filled with defensive fear, setting up barriers and protective distances which go against our purposes, and that there is no help from anywhere else, and that there is no faith beyond love.... This rambling nervous speech by a "madman" on the edge is the most overt statement of the theme of this film. The lawyer played by Hurt does hug him and Penn asks if he is an angel. "No." This same question is asked later by Robin Wright Penn's character, the main character that is. (Penn then walks back toward a remote house and in the background, and if you listen carefully you'll hear someone far away calling a "Michael" to come in for breakfast-- seems he lives in a group home where the staff take care of him.)Main story is about an ambiguous case of domestic violence, of spouse abuse. Young man is brought to court in the name of 3 past girlfriends who all have the same tragic profile of hospitalizations and self-abuse or suicide tendencies. Robin Wright Penn character is eccentric, direct, sensitive, and disciplined as a swimmer, honest, yet a bit confused about the abusive relationship. She defends it as the best thing that ever happened to her, but everyone around her is convinced that she's a victim. The film avoids taking obvious sides on this, by giving both sides a passionate voice. In the courtroom showdown, Robin's character is asked point blank how she would describe their relationship: "I wouldn't" describe it is her considered answer. The abuser seems to be a sensitive and overly intense man who was "tryng to break through her skin to the real self inside". His extreme magnetism is to attempt to get too attached, too united with a lover -- more than is humanly possible, and in frustration at this impossibility, he explodes in rages. The human condition compels attraction and repels it simultaneously. A sick kind of intimacy to be sure, but his quest for an absolute oneness inspires both devotion and confused self-destruction. After the trial scenes, he admits that he has wronged others and that he is now afraid to get attached to anyone: "I can't afford to" he cries. There is no hope.Yet this fear of attachment and the self-blaming is echoed in a much more subtle manner in the lawyer's life. He blames himself for his own divorce and now is also afraid to love anyone especially. Instead he "loves" everyone equally, but also sees the world as full of enemies who need to be prosecuted, which is his career. It is his own existential suffering that allows him to see so clearly into the confusions of Robin's character. She later realizes this and likewise asks him to confess. This sounds less interesting than the way it actually comes across as an emotional film about emotional intensity and our deadening withdrawal from the severe and unstable results of such relationships. There are a series of interesting contrasts set up throughout the relationships in this film and their transformations.Robin's character is insistent upon the precise language she needs for her experience --"hit" as opposed to "strike"; "stepped into" as opposed to "jumped off" etc., yet she is in denial about her year and a half of insomnia that drove her to attempt suicide. It started right after she heard that the abusive-sensitive man hurt his new girlfriend more than her: which she understood in her private nightmare as proof that he loved the new woman more. She has come to equate the degree of violence with the degree of genuine connection, and feels "envy". At this point she lost touch with reality and became afraid of the dark: "the table was not a table." She argues this point extensively, but the Hurt lawyer- psychotherapist seems to outwit her. It is "her state of mind that is the essence of this case" he says.Nevertheless, her view affects him a lot. He seems to be falling for her--he's a lonely divorcée. He seems unconsciously to want to prosecute himself through the abuser for some untold failure in himself. It is suggested that he was unfaithful to his wife before. While not an abuser, he does blame himself for the divorce-- he's now "stopped believing in himself". The phrase "a table is not a table" is used throughout, explained in the first courtroom scene, to mean the state of mind in which you lose faith in something you trusted--in somebody. He saves her from her confusion and denial, yet in the end it is suggested that she will save him in turn from his own loss. In the final scene, we cannot tell whether she will pull him into the pool or he will pull her out -- precisely because it is both at once on the emotional level.

I saw this film while voting for the Independent Spirit Awards and I must say it had many of my favorite performers. William Hurt, Amy Madigan, Sean Penn (whose company helped make the movie), Joanna Cassidy, Paul Dooley and Jennifer Rubin is like a dream cast to me. I couldn't wait for them to be put to good use. Sadly, they were given almost nothing interesting to do. It has a good setup, it is about the damage that happens in abusive relationships, specifically what people are willing to endure in order to feel loved. The project was not structured or developed very well, however. I think the script needed a few more drafts because the situations needed more urgency or more weight. Most good independent films take you on an emotional or spiritual journey and this film just did not do that.

This must be the singular most boring movie that I've ever seen. I can't remember a movie being so slow to reach a punchline that simply never excists. The whole movie should simply never have been made.

A previous commentist accurately summarized the plot as follows: When an abusive man's girlfriend ends up in a wheelchair and another one jumps in front of a car to end her misery, attorney William Hurt decides to bring him to trial. Emotionally-scarred Robin Wright is called to testify at a court hearing against her former lover.However, the rest of his comments indicate that it's not just adolescent Americans who want movie stories neatly finished by the end of the movie. I found this film to be a thoughtful examination of several aspects of love and dependency. It provides no easy answers to the questions posed and actually requires the viewer to pay attention and THINK. Performances are uniformly excellent, especially Robin Penn Wright's in the principal role.