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Excellent Movie 10/10

posted 11 years ago by TemporaryOne-1
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- Excellent depiction of textbook schizophrenia

- Metatheatre

- Metaleptical (Winona steps into fiction/delusion of her fictional play, stage actors are forced to be on stage who they really are while acting out a real-life scenario involving them that Winona thinks is happening off-stage)

- Deterioration of mind projecting deterioration of marriage

- Construction of a play results in deconstruction of theatre

- Construction of play removes limitations enabling metaleptical shifts between the real and the fiction, eventually resulting in deconstruction of play, paralleling Winona's mental breakdown

- Deterioration of stage presence: actors using their real names, actors asked to act out on stage an affair they're being accused of having by the playwright: play changes from a meeting of creative forces to a real mind game, distancing actors from the play and from each other; paralleling deterioration of mind (delusions become reality then breakdown)

- The whole film is a Beckettion - Deterioration of stage presence subverts theatre's concreteness, fixating on the "thereness" of the characters (represented by Winona frequently ordering one actor to answer another actor's question: forcing actors to step out of role and be themselves and be there as a the person they really are and spontaneously and critically resolve somebody else's creative dilemma then quickly step back into their own character......) forcing playwright and actors and audience to question what's really going on, what they really see; this deterioration and fixation on "thereness" parallelis playwright's mental breakdown: deterioration of mind by fixating on ""thereness subverts concreteness of reality

[–] rooprect 9 years ago

I'm with you, TemporaryOne-1 (and by the way, I think I've seen you around imdb somewhere before, probably in one of the many obscure yet awesome film boards I've wandered past). This movie gives us one of the most complex reality/fiction breakdowns since Synecdoche New York. A lot of "The Letter" made me feel like I was seeing the last act of Hamlet on coke, with the parallels of reality & stage crashing head on, bringing out guilt, paranoia, truth, deceit, and of course madness.

The trailer made me think this might be sort of a predictable thriller, Anania/Franco dumbing it down after their last cerebral masterpiece "William Vincent". But instead I got everything I had hoped for. I hope the team goes on to make many more films like this.