"That's a nice-a donut."
Monday, April 11, 2005
Safe
Safe, directed by Todd Haynes and starring Julianne Moore, is about an upper middle-class suburban woman whose health begins to mysteriously deteriorate. From the beginning it is apparent that she is not too happy with life, and living in the material world, and later she begins to have difficulty breathing and vomits without warning. Her doctor indicates that nothing is wrong, and then a psychiatrist finds no major problems either. And so on, and so forth, until she ends up in a holistic / new-age health commune with other people with a condition known as "environmental illness".
Moore is very convincing portraying the exhaustion, self-doubt, and even self-hate that inflict the troubled woman. Surely many normal people experience such emotions from time-to-time, but few experience them to such extremes. And that brings me to what is actually a positive and a negative about Safe. It seems to want to have it both ways: as both a dark comedy satire on suburban living, but also as a tender study of a woman's breakdown due to everyday things. With that in mind: this is a good, but not great, film.
The Verdict: B-.
Michael Bentley 11:32 AM
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