Plot:
Roy Walker (Lee Pace) is a broken man in more ways than one: Unable to walk after a fall from a horse in a movie stunt gone awry, his girlfriend ran off with the movie's leading man and he is hospitalized in 1915 in a Los Angeles hospital feeling very sorry for himself.
He launches on a plan to end his life that features befriending a five year old girl(Catinca Untaru) with his ability to tell epic stories In exchange for the continued telling of his elaborate tale, he bribes her to steal lethal pills to be used for his ultimate demise.
Commentary:
This is the work of a master film maker. The elaborate story told to the child uses 18 countries as the location for the footage. The scenes are beautiful, the story alittle too complicated for me but what stands out the most is the underlying immorality of the plot itself.
Imagine this selfish man devising a plan to use a five year old girl as an assistant in the act of his suicide when he is the very person with whom she has developed a loving relationship that sustains and softens her isolation during her own protracted period of hospitalization.
Image the ruination of her life once she comes of age and realises what she has done. The hours of therapy, if she is lucky, to free herself of guilt, to free herself of love for this cruel man. Imagine her struggle to come to terms with what he was really like and to grasp the significance of his evil, self centered uncaring nature!
This is a horror film with an agenda that is so callous towards the emotional life of a child that it made me recoil. Yet, it might just be part of the general misuse of children in the film industry, a trend I hope will one day be reversed.
Linda Zises
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