When hypnotized, Grace was a witness to everything. When Mike was hypnotized, he was one with the events, and was Margaret Strauss. So, does that mean Grace was Roman Strauss?
The best way to get something done is to begin. ~ Anonymous
Yes... I think that was the idea. When Church is hypnotised he sees his image in the mirror in 1949 and it's Margaret. It's touched on more than once: one of the characters asks Church about it later and comments on what a great body he had... i.e. when he was Margaret.
shareLOL! The line you're referring to was said by Robin Williams. It was after Mike had gone under hypnosis and discovered he was Margaret, not Roman. He goes to talk to Cozy Carlisle, as he was a psychologist and has dealt with this sort of thing. Mike took the magazine and showed it to Carlisle, who said:
"...you look more like him than her, but what a babe you were!"
Makes me giggle every time I see it.
I love this movie. It's so underrated, I publicize it to everyone who talks movies with me.
I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.share
Sorry, I didn't read your question properly.
But I'm sure the answer is still yes: they were each other.
there are some really great clues throughout the movie to strengthen the connection between mike church/margaret strauss and grace/roman strauss. here's a few:
in the scene where roman and margaret have their first date, margaret spills champagne on roman. during mike and grace's first date, mike spills tea on grace in the same manner.
the old gray baker holds mike's hand very tenderly while mike lights his cigarette; it seems like he recognizes the hand as margaret's.
during mike and grace's first date, mike approaches grace who is standing at the piano and plays the first line of a song. during margaret and roman's first date, margaret is at the piano playing the first line of roman's opera, the same song.
mike is immediately suspicious of the older frankie, much the same way that margaret is suspicious of the younger frankie.
the starlet played by jo anderson blows roman off as an unimportant party guest at the costume ball, contibuting to roman's emotional downfall. the nun played by jo anderson seems very concerned about helping out grace after her emotional downfall (getting mugged and developing amnesia). karma anyone?
grace and roman are both "nobody"- roman because he thinks he's lost his talent, and grace because she has amnesia.
as i've been thinking about the clues, it seems as though the connection between grace and roman strauss is less developed. my opinion about this is that grace has amnesia and has less well-developed personality traits that she might have had if she knew who she was.
That's interesting, I didn't know the nun and the starlet were the same person. The main things I noticed were when Mike is hypnotized he sees himself in the mirror as Margaret, also at the end the modern day picture and old picture are shown and they are on different sides in each one.
shareI think this is an interesting little twist: The starlet, who was obviously willing to throw herself at whomever was 'important' in the business of Hollywood, snubs Roman, who ends up in despair and sets of the awful chain of events. Even though she did not consciously realize what she did, she ends up as a nun in the next life--not a *beep* (time to atone for previous sins!), and ends up actually helping that soul who was Roman. Funny how one little careless comment can set off such a terrible chain reaction--it reminds one to watch what comes out of one's mouth...
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
here is some more things.
Both Mike and Margret have reporter friends
The word Grace
Frankie, the mad son, name is Madson
aMANda-roMAN
Micheal-Margret
Margret wants Gray to stop smoking-Mike is trying to
Both names given to "Grace" Sharp and pierce can be sissor or music terms
It is my theory that Inga murdered Roman's first wife ( unbeknownst to him and motivated by her love for him) which is a parallel with Frankie murdering his second wife.
shareYes, Grace was Roman Strauss. But nobody knew it until after Mike was hypnotized. When he went under, he was told to actually be part of the past, whereas when Grace did it, she was simply told to watch the past, be an observer. That is why she didn't know that in her past life, she was Roman Strauss.
sharethe climax reveals that mike is margaret because robin williams talks early on about karma and "burning someone in one life and getting burned in the next"
Frankie thinks that Grace is Margaret and she will get him back for killing her in her past life but in the end Mike aka Margaret gives Frankie the final fatal blow (with Amanda/Grace's giant scissor sculpture...parallelism) although grace stabbing him with the small scissors does the primary damage
my questions are
a) if mike was the one who was murdured in the past life, why was grace the one having the dreams
and b) why did roman carry the scissors with him as he walked to be executed?
c) what was the truth about roman's escape through the mountains. was all his money from his wife like margaret thought? did she have heart problems? how did inga and frankie come into the picture?
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thanks that had me confused
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My sister has made me watch this movie a few times. I always have wondered something. At the end when Mr.Madson and Mike are fighting you know how they have the flashbacks of the night Margarter was killed. Well after margaret is killed Roman doesn't know she is dead but he gets up from the piano and starts running screaming Margaret through out the house. How did he know something was wrong?
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Also it makes sense that Amanda(Roman) was having the dreams about Margaret's murder because it shows how devestated Roman was by his wife's murder. They were so in love and you can imagine just how it effected him--he was haunted/obsessed by it.
The sequence in the dreams showing Margaret waking up terrified and being stabbed with the scissors is how Roman imagined the scene in his mind since he was downstairs at the time. (When we actually see her murder, we see that it does not happen like it does in the dreams.) I don't know why Amanda's(Roman's) dreams never showed Frankie though, it doesn't make logical sense, although if they did this would have given away the big twist of the movie.
"You haven't switched from liquor to dope by any chance, have you Dexter?" --Katharine Hepburn
Oh BTW, in case everyone is not confused enough yet at all the reincarnations and karma going on... in addition to the starlet/nun reincarnation, one of the cops at County Hospital in the present day, also shows up as a drunk party guest in the past (apparently he was forced to be a cop at an insane asylum as punishment for his obnoxiousness).
shareAlso makes sense that the nun said the only thing she said was dysher (dir schear), which is what Roman would say since Roman was German.
Such a great movie!!
A) Grace is having the dreams because the trauma of being mugged is bringing all the previous things in the past back to the present. After all, Margaret is Roman in the past, a person obsessed with the heartbreak of loosing their only true love and then being accussed of being the murdered. Double whammy!
b) The scissor scene at the start is just a nightmare. Otherwise, how could he kill her twice.
c) I believe Roman's wife did die on the journey. Inga and Frankie where there housekeeper and her son. They made the journey with them and I think Roman feels personally responsible for them. Plus they form a link to his own past and late wife.
The whole suspiscion surrounding Roman's first wife is meant to be a red herring according to Kenneth Branagh on his dvd commentary. All those little details are simply meant to throw the viewer off so what Roman says about his wife must be true.
shareThe first words out of Grace's mouth are, "Somebody Help Me!!!" This is what Roman says when discovering his wife's body. I liked the fact that Grace's real name was A Man da SHARP. Of course she was once a man. I also figured that Pete must have some connection with Otto. Otto was a Hollywood letch and Pete was a family man and seems to connect with Grace when he first meets her. He also stops by with the pizza and Otto tries to help Roman. I was wondering if Cosy Carlyle is in fact Sigmund Freud. Mike Church talks about being a bad kid and quite physical...Margaret was the hitter..throwing her earings off etc.
shareI don't have the dvd. Was anything said about the Robin Williams character? Was he actually Freud? Is there a past/present connection like nun/starlet, otto/newspaper guy?
shareRobin Williams' character has no double in the past.
Otto was not a double of the newspaper guy (if by newspaper guy you mean Wayne Knight).
The only doubles in the movie, aside from Roman/Grace and Margaret/Mike, were the nun/starlet, and the County Hospital cop who showed up as one of the guests at Otto's party (who is tough to spot unless you are looking for him).
Thanks for your reply. I just feel that the characters of Otto and Robin Williams, although not a physical reproduction have some conection.....
sharea) if mike was the one who was murdered in the past life, why was grace the one having the dreams
In a sense, Roman was also "murdered" by Frankie since he got sent to the electric chair for a crime he did not commit. Margaret's horror lasted only a minute or two, but Roman was falsely convicted of murdering the woman he loved. It was Roman's karmic energy that caused this all to take place again. This was foretold in the first scene where Roman says " ... this is all far from over".
b) why did roman carry the scissors with him as he walked to be executed?
As someone else explained, this scene was a nightmare that Grace/Roman was having. When we finally see Grace's art studio we find that she has been totally obsessed by scissors. It is not surprising that scissors dominate her nightmares as well.
We are first led to believe that Grace was having this nightmare because she was betrayed and murdered by her husband. We are led to believe that Roman was carrying the scissors because Grace/Margaret was "re-living" being murdered by him. After we find out that Grace was Roman and Mike was Margaret, we see that Grace/Roman had scissors in the nightmare because he was falsely accused of using scissors to murder the wife he actually loved. The trauma was not that of being murdered but rather the trauma of finding his wife murdered and then being falsely accused.
This brings up another point that I haven't seen mentioned yet. The first scene is a great tip-off that Grace was really Roman (but I certainly didn't pick up on it until after Mike was hypnotized). It was a shock that Grace woke up screaming from this dream when it really centered around Roman and events that Margaret knew nothing about (since she was already dead). Another interesting thing is that Mike knew from the prison guard's book that Roman appeared to whisper into Gray Baker's ear in the prison cell. The fact that this tidbit actually happened and was in Grace's dream is part of the tip-off that Grace was Roman.
c) what was the truth about roman's escape through the mountains. was all his money from his wife like margaret thought?
I am sure that Roman did not murder his first wife. I think he was telling the truth about his escape. I got the feeling that not all his money was from his first wife, but he probably did get most of his money from her. I think that Roman was basically a good guy but perhaps a bit careless with money because of his creative disposition.
These plot elements cast doubt on Roman and were very useful to make the story work. First and foremost, they were part of a squabble between Roman and Margaret that everyone around them (Gray Baker, Inga, and Frankie) was purposefully fueling. The audience wants to like Roman but these elements raise doubts and cause us to wonder if he really did kill his first wife and Margaret as well. We, along with Margaret wonder if he is a villain. The squabble in turn provides a motive for Roman to murder Margaret. So not only were we the audience misled along with Margaret but the jury that convicted Roman was misled too.
The one loose end that I would like to understand better is the relationship between Gray and Margaret. It is clear that she knew Gray before she met Roman but I don't know if they were intimate or just friends. I get the feeling that they either dated or had a fling. It was not significant to Margaret but Gray wanted to rekindle it even though Margaret was now married to another man.
I don't think Gray and Margaret knew each other before she got married. The woman Gray came to the wedding reception with introduced them. Gray was just being flirty when he said that if he'd been back from the war earlier he would have liked to romance Margaret. Later he decides to take advantage of her confusion and unhappiness to try and take things further, despite the fact that she's married.
shareIf you really think about it for a second, the amiable, wisecracking Mike is close in personality to the friendly, extroverted Margaret, and both Grace and Roman are intense, introverted, and passionate.
shareDon't forget the less subtle clues - like Grace screaming out "Somebody help me!" when she's first put under hypnosis (Roman's words when he discovers Margaret's dead body).
"He murders his wife every night. Other than that, I think he's pretty harmless."
I've just thought of another (admittedly rather tenuous) link. After Margaret spills champagne, Roman proposes the toast "To Margaret, a woman with more beauty than Grace."
"He murders his wife every night. Other than that, I think he's pretty harmless."
This might not be much, but the writer solves a very important part of the puzzle in the first scene featuring the hypnotist (Madson) when the hypnotist introduces himself as Franklyn Madson. However, I believe that this clue is only detectable on subsequent viewings. I would imagine it would take an unusually discerning person to associate the name Franklyn or "Frankie" with the young boy who turned out to be Margaret Strauss's killer. Not on the first viewing anayway.
"Do you know what a lawman is, Crowe? He is a killer of men" Jared Maddox in "Lawman"
Part of the key to the whole gender-bender switch is the anklet. It was supposed to make them 2 halves of the same person, thus allowing the switch, where each looks more like the other one did in the previous life. I don't think I'm explaining this well, but hopefully you can make sense of it.
shareNo, no, you're absolutely right hgorrell. In fact, it confused me the first time I watched it as when it was said that the anklet made them two halves of the same person, I thought that they were either both Margaret (and neither one was Roman) which would have been interesting, or that they were both Margaret and Roman - so rather than being one or the other they were both of them.
In fact, the latter idea would have worked quite well I think and might have explained why it feels like there's some overlap in the things that Grace remembers - for instance, if Grace was Roman then how come she knows what was said between Margaret and Gray Baker when Roman wasn't even present? I always felt that was a bit of a hole in the plot of an otherwise very good film.
"He murders his wife every night. Other than that, I think he's pretty harmless."
Another hint (about Frankie) that I didn't pick up on until the 2nd or 3rd time was when Madson was hypnotizing Grace for the 2nd time and she said the name Strauss....Franklin got all choked up while drinking his glass of water.
shareThat's true, and his choking on water is just passed off as him knowing the Strauss name and history from his work in the antiques market (he shows them the old TIME magazine, implying that it's just something he knows about through his work).
Clever!
"He murders his wife every night. Other than that, I think he's pretty harmless."
Psyche-8, you brought up something I hadn't even considered, memory-overlap. I had just figured the explanation for the possible plot hole, was that the conversation between Margaret and Gray Baker could have come out in Roman's trial. Plus Roman was eavesdropping on part of the conversation as well, and it's not clear exaclty how much he might have overheard.
shareYes... She was him, and he was her.... They kind of switched parts and genders. She (Emma Thompson) was Roman before and killed Margaret. Now Margaret (played by Emma earlier) is Mike and Roman (played by Kenneth) is Grace. Hehe... Get it?
Margaret (Emma) ---> Mike (Kenneth)
Roman (Kenneth) ---> Grace (Emma)
technically neither grace nor mike were roman or margaret. they were two completely different sets of people. franklyn the hypnotyist killed margaret many years back when he was a kid, and roman was wrongfully executed for her murder. then, the maid (old woman/franks mother) brought frank to see someone to try and get rid of all his demons, but it only messed with his mind more. he thought that roman and margaret were gonna come back in another life to haunt him. when he finds out about this amnesia woman and the detective, who the director purposely casts as the same exact people just to screw with the audiences mind, he gets to making himself believe they are the ones who have come back to haunt him and in the process of hypnotizing them gets them to believe it too. mike and grace were only meant to look similar to rowan and margaret, but not actually be the same people. that's what i got out of the movie.
shareBB40 - So if they weren't Roman & Margaret in their past lives, why was Grace having nightmares about the murder before she even met Frankie?
The point of the movie is that Roman was so horrified over the fact that his beloved wife was murdered and he was executed for it that his feelings carry over into his next life as Grace/Amanda.
I always think it's interesting that when Grace lost her memory she ended up at the boy's school/orphanage, which is where Mike grew up and was also the same house that Roman and Margaret lived in.
No one seems to be remembering the biggest tip off of all that Mike wasn't Roman ... He says, blatantly, a few times, "I'm not Roman!" We all believe at first that he just doesn't believe in all that karma crap, but the deeper meaning is that he's telling the truth.
shareGrace/Roman was suppose to be intense, scared, fearful, introverted.
Mike/Margaret was daring, fearless, kind, wisecracking, extroverted.
Frankie/Franklyn knew that possibly fifty years later, that by seeing her picture in the newspaper. That Grace/Roman appeared and that he needed to kill her in order to protect that secret from the grave.