This was wonderful. Just wonderful

I posted the following over at the Saoirse Ronan board. But it talks about the film so I present it here slightly edited:

I hadn't liked it much when I first saw it maybe three years ago. The love story seemed pretty incomprehensible. Even though Houdini knows Mary's a fake who wants to win the $10,000 bet, she knows he knows, he knows she knows he knows, etc., they fall in love anyway, and she still goes through with the $10,000 test, right up until almost the end.
But it has improved with age. Houdini likes to expose psychic phonies but he also wants to believe.

Now I think it might be Saoirse's best role, certainly it's her most complex. Briony in Atonement would have been but in that movie she only plays the 13 year old, not the woman Briony grows into.
In Death Defying Acts Saoirse's character, Benji, becomes the repository of all the complex emotions swirling about.

Yes, Saoirse's fantastic in the final seance scene when she takes over from her mom, who, in a stroke of conscience, can no longer go through with the con, but it's when Houdini is leaving them she hits it into the stratosphere.

Benji's been more or less in love with Houdini herself since the beginning, yet she too wants to fleece him for the $10,000. But she also wants to believe in herself, that the "special gift" she had as an even younger child but grew out of as her mother said she would was a part of her real being and gave her a sense of personal integrity.

So we get the scene right after Houdini leaves, mom comes up to daughter, daughter starts juggling and reveals in a sing-song banter the whole seance thing was an act to "give him what he wanted" and accuses her mom of "going soft," ever trying to maintain the sneaky con artist persona she's cultivated, which goes at odds with what she secretly yearns for.
But then her mom agrees, saying, "That's my girl," and the daughter's confidence crumbles, her face grows unspeakably sad and a tear rolls down her cheek. It's one of the few scenes Saoirse has done that's designed to make you cry. You do, of course. You don't think an actress of her caliber is going to fail in that requirement, do you?

And it's there the film falls into focus for me. The three all saved each other by finding love in a cynical "carnival" world where all that's going on around them, what they themselves are actively doing, can't touch their inner cores. Mother and daughter have each other, finally. Houdini finds grace at the end of his life.
Really nice movie.

Theory on the title. Death Defying Acts denotes not just what Houdini does for a living, but what the three of them do to discover themselves while the world works at denying them that ability.