Change Your Image
magellan6
Reviews
Carried Away (2009)
Go West,, Old Lady...
Virgil leaves no footprints in hell because, as Dante notes, the dead have no weight. Tom Huckabee's "Carried Away" also has a weightlessness, even when the film is basically the story of a family unravelling and reravelling (I love making up words) around a Christmas road trip or kidnapping, depending on whose lens your looking from.
What Huckabee does wonderfully is capture the light and dark in so many characters, which initially appear as contradictions but finally amount to a whole-of-the-many-parts. Only someone with experience in the South can truly recall family prayers that were 1/3 holy, 1/3 political manifesto and 1/3 admonishment for a recent mistake, all over a holiday dinner.
I am thinking of a Czech novel--The Unbearable Lightness of Being--which was in reality just the opposite--a story about the oppressive weight of the world. Huckabee has given us the opposite--a film which plays on the accumulation of dysfunctions until we are "Carried Away", when in fact the film is the opposite: a beautiful testimony to a family, a story, a script and a director who never allowed himself to be just that--Carried Away. Time well spent watching this!
Note: Sublime music...look for more from Theater Fire in the future...