Didn't get the movie on first viewing, but...

I woke up in the night thinking of this film and how it ends. Haven't seen it in years but watch every time I find it on cable. I love your remarks about it, Reachtitan. There's something so beautiful and moving about the film. In many ways it shouldn't "work" (and thus many don't seem to enjoy it) and yet it does work for a great number of people who fall under its spell. Linda Manz's narration, her tone of voice, make it seem like a fractured memory recalled many years later. Her character was a young girl who saw all these events unfold but didn't fully understand the emotions and motivations of the people she observed.

It was also stark and cynical, in a way, painting a mosaic of characters and feeling that never felt completely whole when juxtaposed against the vast expanse of sky and ground, fire and wheat, hate and love that enveloped it all beyond any one person's own strength of will to drive and prevent. It's an edifying kind of starkness, though, I guess, because what it doesn't do is hold bias towards either Man or Nature, or will or fate or whatever. With (and I think the voiceover by Linda has much [if not everything] to do with it) placidity, it assumes the part of a sort of disembodied, haunting memory, as rife with beautiful images as it was with cold and remorseless reality.

But in spite of what can be said about the plot (which isn't that much, lol), it's the central theme I think that hammers home the most grounded, most direct implication of human facticity; something universal and once experienced by all before; something I realized that the movie might just have been principally (if not all) about. After Linda walks away with one of her good friends from which she originally met at the farm, stepping along the tracks of the empty railroad, her voice emerges again over the scene, and she is again talking to us in -ed's and was's. She refers to the girl as lost and sort of wandering, not much sure where she was heading, and then recounts their friendship as one distant and long ago, as if now (or at least, at the time of her speaking), she was gone. Estranged. Maybe even dead. Who knows?

And then that's when I recalled a previous line, also from Manz's fudgin' sublime voiceover, lol, about the farmer and being lonely.

And then I thought, oh. Maybe that's what it was about. Maybe, in some way, it was about loneliness; about the emotional isolation that came not from sky or ground, fire or wheat, or even hate and love, but from just being a child in a world reigned by men much older, women matured -- adults who, apparently, didn't seem to know where their destiny lay just as much as Linda could have measured the worth of a man by his affinity for collecting flowers.

Maybe, in the context of the world, and of time and of nature, of will and chance, of the unfathomable macrocosm of time and of space, alone is all we humans can yearn to be; everything else -- well -- is not up to you.

"Didn't get the movie on first viewing, but... It touched something deep within my soul. It gave birth to a sense of wonder and awe about this world".

But the above proves you DID "get it"...



"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan