paterfam001

My wife, my wife's cousin and I recently rented this movie - my recommendation, prompted by very good ratings both here and on Rottentomatoes. How surprised we were to find that it was a big soggy mass of treacly goo. It's sweet, but it's rather sickly and quite stupid. In case you think we are heartless 20-year-old slackers with a letch for gore, we are 65, 67 & 70 years of age, college-educated. I am still in the workplace, and my wife and her cousin are docents at a local museum, a volunteer position that requires both intelligence and aplomb. In case you think we have no standards of comparison, we agreed afterward that 'Rabbit-Proof Fence' and 'Whale Rider' both films about children in crisis, and both with about the same RT rating as 'Millions', were superior in every way. What madness gripped the minds of the film-critics of America, that they gave this manipulative piece of sanctimonious product-placement a high mark?

The high rating of this movie has to be a fanboy campaign. Despite a high recommendation from one of my children, I didn't last five minutes. It wasn't the violence: many of the movies I have enjoyed most and been most impressed with have been violent (Kill Bill, the Departed, this year's No Country and Eastern Promises). No. What is was was that the first five minutes told me that the film-makers simply didn't know what they were doing. Voice-over: 'World War Three.' blah, blah, blah. Stock footage: H-bomb, Stalin, Saddam. (If they'd had any guts they'd have shown a picture of Bush) Voice-over: Blah, blah, Grammaton cleric... Silhouette of Martial-arts heavy Voice-over: Total non-sequitur... 'Our capacity to feel.' Then you show some heavy dudes brooding over SOME OF THE CRAPPIEST ART EVER MADE. Couldn't they at least moon at the Mona Lisa? Rembrandt's Bathsheba? Picasso's portrait of Dora Maar? No. One portrait that looked like it came off the cover of the 1912 Ladies' Home Companion, and La Source (the archetypal Academic nude and exactly the thing great painters despised, from Courbet on). Spare me! Oh, never mind! I spared myself, and pushed the 'off button. Anyone out there who gave this more than a three - in the words of the immortal William Shatner - "Have you ever kissed a girl?"

I cannot for my life imagine why this movie was made. The story is both improbable and prosaic, as well as confusingly ill-told. The main characters are unappealing, though some of the supporting characters, and their relations to the protagonist, have a life of their own - they appear to be visiting from another and much better movie. The tone is uneasy and inconsistent, varying from slice-of-life to tragedy to melodrama to (very briefly) absurdist farce. The trailer that I saw was as misleading as it could possibly be, promising farce, while the movie is very bland and matter-of-fact. The last scene of the movie (I don't think this is a spoiler) shows the protagonist (there ought to be a short word, when you cannot bring yourself to say 'hero') driving a car in front of the phoniest back-projection landscape I have ever seen. The landscape is Africa - presumably the Congo - dragged in by the heels to justify the title. Are the Belgians still guilty about the Congo?