Just For Lookin' Thru

Written in 1940, Miller’s play reached Broadway in 1944, closed after four performances, and knocked his career sideways. It must have been way before its time, because this play about a young man having it all while those around him fail and flounder is superb. Staged in 1944, post-depression, perhaps it was too realistic. Seeing the play today, it is about fate, acceptance, and philosophy, and sits comfortably with our modern understanding of psychological self-doubt and anxiety. Western neuroses recur about why some of us have wealth and success and some have nothing, locally and globally. Miller’s play questions how much control we have over our own destinies, and what effect we have when we try to force events. From a go-with-the-flow attitude to make-it-happen determination, The Man Who Had All The Luck suggests a combination of the two. David Beeves is a cheerful, self-taught motor mechanic with a small repair shop in Michigan. In love with his childhood sweetheart, al...

We are treated to a bizarre short film set in a hotel room in Paris with Jack’s girlfriend (Natalie Portman) before the main feature. As a result, Jack (Jason Schwartzman) holds attention in the main feature because we have some idea about his sense of loss. Perhaps if all three brothers had been given a short of their own we could have understood them better. The film blurb gives us the clue that three brothers haven’t spoken for a year, since their father’s death. Without reading that first, the film doesn’t show us this, or tell us why. What we see is a meeting of the brothers on a train in India, for the purpose of a spiritual quest orchestrated by brother Francis (Owen Wilson) heavily bandaged after a bad car accident. Peter and Jack humour him. Again, what’s the backstory? There are clues that their mother wasn’t around much for them and won’t want to see them, but no clues about their relationship with their father, or whether their low-level sibling rivalry has st...