Several things about this film and its ensuing audience response, as exemplified by the posts on this thread, deserve particular attention.
First, what this movie is about - its thematic content - and the actual events portrayed on the screen - either real or imagined [read: either in a dream state or part of a psychotic hallucination] are actually two distinct domains that unfortuantely have an awkward discontinuity between them. Because of this, the movie suffers since most of the audience right from the start, including myself, is so fixated on figuring out what the reality and fantasy components are in this film and is, therefore, deluded into believing that, by figuring out this seemingly "mystical" component of the film, its real and hopefully powerful [we can only hope its powerful since we spent all of our precious time trying to figure all of the above out] message will be magnificently unveiled. As I mentioned above, unfortunately this distraction causes an uneasiness in how we each individually interpret the films content and, in effect, the film sabotages itself because of this.
To really get to the film's message, I found it neccessary to completely ignore the time element of the film and to avoid trying to figure out what was real and what was imaginary in this flick. Once I did this I realized that the only safe "anchor" of reality that you could really cling to in the film is the ending - no, not the school bus crash but the scene where we see Danika wandering the streets as a homeless person. Once you do this, you realize that it really makes no difference what is real or imagined in Danika's head from this point to the past [or, for that matter, future, since we have no idea of which of these scenes are actually real or imagined by Danika as happening in whatever time frame: past, present, or future]. So I began to analyze individually all of the little "snippets" of scenes in the film and found that the easiest and logically most consistent thematic element one could use to connect these scenes - again either real or imaginary - is trust and its logical "antithesis", the betrayal of that trust. It then became clear to me that the interpretive value of trust in each of the scenes, again either real or imagined, is RELATIVE to the characters that are portrayed in these scenes as played out in Danik's mind - what we see on the screen.
One of the most clear cut examples of this is the scene where Danika relives the tragic car accident which kills her young brother. Now as she relives it on the screen and simultaneously retells this story, she states that [I'm paraphrasing here so bear with me] her mother was susposed to be watching him and ergo it was really her mother's fault that her brother ran out into the street and was struck down. But in that very same scene and in her description of what happened we see the child Danika playing with her brother out on the front lawn - she was just as much a part of those tragic events as was her mother, perhaps even more so since she was directly involved in an activity with him. So why does she distincly put the exclusive blame for what happened on her mother? Couldn't she have interevened in some way to even at the very least yell or shout to alert her mother? For my interpretation, however, everything would have happened so quickly that probably neither she nor her mother could have prevented the accident to her brother. Incidentally, a corollary to this scene is the one - again either real or imaginary, it makes no difference - where she is held up in her boss's office as the bank robbery unfolds outside. We are expecting her to do something heroic here - saving the day, so to speak - but what we see instead is a petrified Danika totally paralyzed in thought to do anything. In essence, I got the feeling here that Danika has difficulty in assigning degrees of trust, even in herself.
From here, to me anyway, it was now easy to see that all of the remaining scenes in the film deal with Danika's tragic flaw in thought at evaluating trust and responsiblity, not only in other people but in herself and in the natural world ("In God We Trust"). The way things are normally supposed to work is that you intrinsically trust the people around you, especially close family members. Her husband, whom she trusts with the fidelty of marriage, has an affair with her nanny, the person that she entrusts with her kids. She trusts the teachers that teach her kids with providing them the right educational milleau and for her kids to be trustworthy and honest with her. But to Danika there is a debilitating interpretive flaw in seemingly all of what she encounters - either real or imagined in her mind. Can she trust her kids and their friends? Can she trust their teachers? Can she trust her husband or mother? Can she trust anybody? And to what normally logical and societally acceptable degree?
Again bear in mind, that perhaps some or even much of what is played out
here might just be figments of her imagination: perhaps she is imagining EVERYTHING that we see on the screen, save for the part showing her as a homeless person wandering the streets. But it really makes no difference here what is real or imagined. Danika is so flawed and paralyzed at making these judgement calls concerning trust that, in the end, she probably doesn't even trust herself all that much: witness the school bus accident where all of her kids are killed - she's the driver and the trust to drive these kids from point A to point B is entirely hers! Whether she lives out these scenes for real or they are just imagined by her, the confrontational experience at assigning trust in these particular instances is so debilitating that in the end all that is left is an empty shell of a human being -living her life as a homeless person. Her hopeless sinking to this eventual state has evolved in this way by a relentless inability to interact with external forces outside of her own mind, which ironically has difficulty in distinguishing a rational level of trust in and of itself.
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