Safe
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Movie Reviews of Safe
Movie Review: Complex, Ambiguous, Unsafe
Summary: 5 Stars
Julianne Moore is magnificent in this careful and slow-moving film. The focus of almost every scene -- unusual for a female role -- she never monopolizes the screen. She even lets the furniture compete with her for attention. She thus captures the dislocation and marginalization of the wraithlike housewife "Carol" (or, as she corrects herself to her psychiatrist, "homemaker"), whose life seems central to nobody, even to herself. Although Xander Berkeley plays her sometimes frustrated husband with immense sensitivity, the sex scene between the two, very close to the beginning of the film, makes the act horrifyingly mechanical and manages to show how even the greatest intimacy can be deeply alienating. At the same time, the film is restrained; its ironies are offered so complexly that one is unsure of the point of view.
After Carol becomes seriously ill from exposure to an environment that is increasingly toxic to her, she takes refuge in Wrenwood, a holistic healing camp in the desert. The film remains uncommitted as to what part of Carol's illness is genuinely physical and what part is psychological. The philosophy offered at Wrenwood is also ambiguous, though it remains clear that the sympathy of the film is no more with New Age therapy than it was with the alienating sterility of Carol's lifestyle back in the San Fernando Valley. The film maintains this difficult balance right up to the devastating final scene.
This is not a film that was written to please the Chemical Sensitivity Movement. To read it as a political movie is a mistake.
Movie Review: Modern Retelling of Yellow Wallpaper
Summary: 5 Stars
The miracle of this film is that somehow Todd Haynes makes it compelling to watch Julianne Moore play Carol White, an inspid waif completely lost and languishing in the asylum of her huge house in San Fernando Valley. She's not even a sympathetic character as we watch her, confronting her boredom by shopping and going on fruit diets, disintegrate from a drab, soulless, wife to a sexless hypochondriac who regresses to the infant state, abandoning her family and moving to a "sanctuary" where she will find a "toxic-free, safe environment." The film succeeds as a satire against happy therapy speak, bovine middle-class self-help cliches, unctuous, self-help charlatans, panacea-promising infomercials, and the kind of needy people who lack the moral fortitude to confront their own weaknesses so instead rely on conspiracy theories and other kinds of scapegoats to explain their repellent personalities, blaming chemicals, for example, for their own ineptness. Carol White and her fellow acoyltes at the "sanctuary" are all brain-numbed on the humorless cult of New Age therapy, giving credence to a motivation speaker who lives in a grand mansion overlooking the shack house squalor of his followers. Ironically, Carol White is even more of a prisoner in her new "safe house" as she was in her husband's home. If you want to bite on an pungent appetizer before watching this brilliant two-hour film, first read Charlotte Perkins Gilman's famous short story "The Yellow Wallpaper." It will really get you in the mood for the kind of insanity rendered in "Safe."Movie Review: Brilliant Film, Top Cast. Not one for Christmas Eve though..
Summary: 5 Stars
Did anyone notice that the time frame of this film was 1987? Only about five years later than the first sightings of AIDS victims in the USA. Even though Carol White was portrayed as a vacuous, self-effacing, and possibly self-loathing homemaker, I don't think that her ailments were psychosomatic. Nor do I believe that her malaise had anything to do with the environment. It made perfect sense that she was seduced into seeking healing and hope at the retreat in New Mexico directed by the New Age charlatan (after all, these people still flourish today).Safe stunningly reveals the cultural arrogance that existed back in the 1980's in any country that was fertile ground for the nouveau wealthy, the already rich, and the affluent. Nice people with nice homes, cars, looks, clothes and very good jobs simply did not get AIDS. Alas, if bank accounts and social acceptability were the only real immunity against venereal and immune deficiency diseases, then most of us would already be dead.
Check out the very last scene in the film where Carol White looks intently into the mirror in her quasi-bubble residence. Doesn't it look as though, for all intents and purposes, that Carol is looking extremely ill, her face gaunt and possessing a not so shadowy large dark Kaposi's Sarcoma-like discoloration over her left eyebrow?
Movie Review: My wife, who is environmentally ill, was technical advisor to this movie.
Summary: 5 Stars
My wife whose name is "Carol" the name of the main character (She goes by Lynn and is listed in the credits) got environmentally ill and almost died in the 1980's before anyone even knew what this illness was. She survived by going through a controversial program created by a doctor whose whole famiily was poisoned by a chemical spill. She remained chemically sensitive and started a non profit organization to help people like herself. Todd Haynes came to our house to go over the script to this movie to get imput from her and a Doctor she worked with who treated victims of this medical problem. She even obtained a lot of the furniture an other items used in the movie. We think the movie was well done and accurate but for the ending. We know it is not a documentary but wanted to say to all who see this movie that the people with environmental illness are not crazy and that the healer type of therapy depicted in the movie is not the cure. There are many resources now to help and this is a recognized disability caused by an accute or long term exposure to toxic chemicals which prevades all of our modern lives daily.Movie Review: Shipped fast & in good shape!
Summary: 5 Stars
This DVD is not out for public release & this one was decently priced. The outside box had obviously been used, but all I really wanted was the movie and the disc was not scratched and worked fine. I was willing to take a used case over spending the $30+ prices other vendors were charging. Well worth it!