Bill Nye Vs. Albert Einstein

Maybe I'm reading too much into this movie. But it was a deceptively simple story with some very deep truths hidden away, so it has inspired me to come up with this theory out of left field. Clive Owen's laughable attempt to maintain his American accent while at first a distraction sort of melted into his character, and it got me thinking about other levels of the movie.

The kid's room has two posters on it, Bill Nye and Albert Einstein. If you think about it, these are the two basic public faces of what scientific understanding means in American culture. There's the arcane and difficult to understand guy who is nonetheless congenial and cool in a geeky way, and there's the guy who tries to take scientific concepts and take them into an understandable, practical level.

This is exactly the theme of the movie -- pitting the arcane and deliberately mysterious ideas of what human nature means (religion etc.), against the practicalities of everyday life and how those ideas are expressed by us on a daily basis. The movie goes through various sins, and sinks into the depths of how those some of those sins affect us -- wrath, greed, sloth, intemperance, false witness, pride, gluttony (the hamburger), and fairly minor lust at a couple of points. And of course, the various types of theft. And those sins, and especially those thefts, don't turn out to be exactly what they seem.

I wouldn't have taken this line of reasoning except for Matthew Modine's rapturously unbelievable and virtually sentient hair. That might have been a wild shot in the dark, but Modine's hair looks too much like Einstein's to be a coincidence. And of course that makes Clive Owen's unkempt 'do look like Bill Nye's -- theory vs. practice. Modine is in the movie for only a little bit, but his presence personifies the idea of theory "that's what they say, right?" He doesn't care about the practical details, he prefers the sticky door because it's something he's gotten used to and doesn't think it needs fixing, he doesn't like the shelves because they don't "fit" somehow with his idea of what his house should look like, etc. And Owen personifies practice -- you do what it takes to try and live up to the ideal, even if it means breaking some rules along the way. Certain parts of the movie sort of fell into place when I started thinking about it like this, and while I suspect that wasn't entirely intentional, there was something about it that I connected with.

The instrument has yet to be invented that can measure my indifference to that remark.