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It's been almost 60 years since one of the more groundbreaking films ever made was released, so influential that it is still felt in TV shows, books, and movies to this day. This film boils down to one word: Rashomon. Rashomon, the 1950 Japanese film from famed auteur Akira Kurosawa, set the standard for non-linear storytelling, something that was almost completely unheard of in Hollywood. Though its essential story is simple (the murder of a samurai and whodunit), the way the screenplay lets the story unfold is unique for its time, even if we've seen hundreds of imitators and homages since its release.

What's so unique about Rashomon is that the story is told in different ways from different people; thus, what a bandit sees as his gleeful attack on the samurai and his meek wife is, from the wife's perspective, something more desperate and pathetic. What the wife sees as powerful and defiant actions against her husband is seen by the bandit as something frightening, unusual, and confusing. Although he is dead by the time the film begins, the samurai is resurrected, in a fashion, to tell his side of the story. Moreover, one story told by one of the witnesses has to be told all over again near the climax, because the others' tales have thrown his into doubt.

It's all a bit confusing, all the more so because the overall story is set apart by a framing device, where a priest and a woodcutter retell the entire film (or what they know of what's gone on) to a wily and cynical peasant searching for shelter from a torrential downpour. Despite having only a few other characters (the samurai, his wife, the bandit, the medium who brings the samurai back), Rashomon feels like a minor epic (minor because the film is just under 90 minutes long), from its expansive forest setting to the melodramatic acting, which is not only a hallmark of most Kurosawa films but is something that you either get behind or you don't.

For the most part, the highest highs and the lowest lows work here; again, it takes some getting used to when the wife, played by Machiko Kyo, veers from being a silently stewing woman to a cackling witch in nearly a minute, but there's something elegant about the film and its performers, especially Toshiro Mifune, who, to Kurosawa, would become the equivalent of Robert De Niro to Martin Scorsese, appearing in 16 (16!) of the great director's films before he passed away. Though Rashomon was not their first collaboration, it was arguably the one that shot both men into the stratosphere of stardom. Ironically enough, the fervent ardor most American audiences and critics heaped upon Rashomon was not equaled by those in Japan, who saw the film as serviceable, but not something worth shouting about.

For those of us in America, a movie like Rashomon served a similar purpose to that of Pulp Fiction: it proved, without a doubt, that movies could be made differently. Granted, Kurosawa's career didn't see many other films like Rashomon in terms of the purposely fractured storytelling, but his films saw a worldwide audience unlike most foreign film directors have ever seen. What other director could argue that men such as George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola not only revered Kurosawa but threw money at one of the director's later films, Kagemusha, so it could be made and released in the United States. Moreover, Scorsese even appeared in Kurosawa's Dreams, such is the influence and power of this man.

All of his films share a slightly ethereal grasp of nature, letting the outdoor surroundings close in from the edges of the camera. In Rashomon, there is a sense of claustrophobia almost immediately, as the peasant runs through the now-muddy ground to get out of the rain, which doesn't fall so much as attack the earth. Even in the flashbacks within flashbacks, when there's no rain to be seen, the trees are crowding in on the characters. Only in the scenes where the witnesses are telling their stories, where they sit in seemingly blank, bare, white space, does nature not encroach on the action. It's hard to tell if Kurosawa imagines this kind of truth-telling helps avoid the deathly grip of Mother Nature, seeing as there's little truth being told in these sections, although that's not clear initially.

The real problem with Rashomon, and there only is the one, is that the techniques, directorial and otherwise, are more interesting than the story. By the time the whole story is unraveled, it doesn't matter much who killed the samurai, what the wife did or didn't do, what the woodcutter had seen and why he had left details out of his original testimony. What's more fascinating are the visuals, the themes, and the performances. You may watch this film and find little to be impressed with, especially with the performances, which I imagine split people in this time of irony-saturated culture. What fun is there to be had in melodrama aside from mocking?

Rashomon is a powerful film, script deficiencies aside. Mifune's playful performance is the topliner, and Kurosawa's visionary streak doesn't disappoint, even in one of his earlier films. The tricks the memory plays on us, and the different ways that we perceive an event have been shown to us in various films; even Kurosawa didn't try to do something as daring as having this split narrative, and play it backward, a la Christopher Nolan's Memento. Here's a film that spends precious time in the vast yet cold embrace of nature, and has an almost God-like view of the story; only at the end, when the woodcutter and priest do something good, something true and unadulterated or ruined by the darker parts of the soul, does the rain abate, the sun shine once again, with peace restored.