We watched this movie on DVD last night, and ended up with the familiar art film feeling of, “Ah, that was interesting, though not particularly pleasant; now we’re even more confident that life has no answers, as if we didn’t know that before.” It is always refreshing, though, to have a movie end with all the loose ends still flapping, rather than tying them up tidily like Hollywood usually does. And the theme, happiness, can’t be beat. Who ever gets tired of trying to figure out this happiness thing?
Having written a book called “Life is Fair” (published non-commercially in India, and hopefully someday commercially in the good old USA), naturally I perked up whenever the theme of life’s fairness came up in this movie. Mostly, it was agreed that life is a crapshoot. Stuff just happens, and you can’t do anything about it. The physicist guy, played by John Turturro, was hung up on cause and effect, so I suppose he would have said that life is fair. He didn’t handle the effects that he caused very well, though.
The only person who stayed happy throughout the whole movie was the positive-thinking guy, the man who accepted everything that happened to him with a “gee, isn’t that great!” attitude. He, of course, irked his co-workers, and apparently had a string of 1-2 year jobs that ended when his permanent state of happiness made people around him miserable. Go figure.
The Hines’ recommend this movie, though you probably shouldn’t see it if you’re seriously disturbed about the seeming meaninglessness of life. “13 Conversations” will confirm your suspicion that the evident surface of life doesn’t make much sense. You add up everything apparent that you’ve done, or has happened to you, and the total won’t begin to equal your current situation. So, either life truly is unfair, or the fairness isn’t obvious from analyzing one life alone. I lean toward reincarnation—the effects of actions in past lives—as explaining life’s seeming unfairness. But the bumper sticker explanation, “shit happens,” has a lot going for it too.
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