Thursday 17 April 2008

Lonesome Jim

I know little about films or the actors who are in them, but I do know that whenever I've seen a film starring Steve Buscemi, he's played a slightly strange character. I wasn't too surprised, then, to find that "Lonesome Jim", which was directed by Steve Buscemi, has a few strange characters in it. The film itself may strike viewers as being a little on the strange side anyway, as it's a low budget affair and the pictures are slightly grainy. If you want trivia, then look at the IMDB: the film was shot in 16 days, using a Panasonic AG-DVX100A mini-DV camera, at a cost of only $500,000. Anyway, there's no need to regurgitate what's already been written elsewhere, so I'll move on. I don't want to recount the story in detail, but I'll outline the basics.

Jim has returned home from Manhattan ("home" is one of those nowhere towns where not much really happens), and he's clearly suffering from major depression. However, fortunately - and this could only really happen in a film - he manages to randomly meet (and have embarrassingly brief sex with) a very caring girl, Anika... She's a nurse, so he sees her again when he has to visit his brother in hospital (after his brother's second failed suicide attempt). And, what a surprise! She might just be the girl who's able to break through the dense darkness that prevents him from seeing any real reason to want to live...

The quote that summarises the plot nicely for me comes when Jim takes Anika (and her son) back home, on their "second date":

Anika: So, do you still live with your parents?
Jim: Yeah, but it's only temporary... I came home to have a nervous breakdown, but my brother beat me to it...

I don't think that there's anything particularly new that can be said about the absurdity of life, or how depressed people respond to what they understand to be a meaningless and useless existence: this has been explored over and over again by so many creative types over the ages - many of whom have their picture on Jim's bedroom wall. Anika looks at these pictures and seems saddened that people could be so unhappy. She cares about people, and she knows that happiness is important. One of the many touching moments in the film is when she turns up at Jim's house with a smile for one of his literary idols (William Burroughs?). Jim doesn't think it looks right - but Anika tells him that it's because he's not used to seeing the guy wearing a smile.


What stands out in this film is just how caring Jim's mother is, and just how caring Anika is. We learn very little about either woman over the course of the film, other than that they seem to have decided that their purpose in life, which will bring them happiness, is to work really hard at making the lives of others more comfortable. The mother is labelled a lunatic by virtually everyone, but she never seems to complain, and the love she has for her family is unending and wholly unconditional. Anika too is mad, as Jim tells her himself: why on earth would she want to hang out with a loser like him? On the flipside, Anika can't understand why on earth Jim would want to think like that.

Of course, using the magic of fiction and the movies, the writer uses the story to put a point across, and the ending is hardly a surprise. The tagline for the film is: "Change your outlook. Change your life." I don't need to say much else about the film, but this tagline is important...

Depression is a difficult topic, because when deep-rooted feelings and emotions are involved (not to mention suicide, murder, drug addiction, and other manifestations of mental and emotional damage), certain points of view can become taboo, mainly because they're unappealing to certain people. Having tousled with the question : "La vie: vaut-elle la peine d'être vécue?" since first reading Albert Camus over ten years ago, having suffered my own fair amount of terrible unhappiness and despair over the years, and having had more depressed friends than happy friends over the course of my life (birds of a feather...), I feel qualified to hold an opinion on the subject of depression. I disagree wholeheartedly that depression is a disease over which the patient has no control. I side with with Thomas Szász and others, and believe that depression is a choice. I know that this opinion upsets a lot of people, but I would like them to realise that the claim that depression is a disease is also no more than an opinion (and a remarkably profitable opinion, that you'll probably wish to back up by funding hundreds of "scientific" studies, if you're peddling anti-depressive drugs).

Whatever your take on depression, if you're interested in people, life, happiness and sadness, then you might well find Lonesome Jim to be a very moving film. There really are some wonderful people in the world (yes, there are some absolute ***** as well, and perhaps they outnumber the nice people, who's to say?), who work hard every day at making life better for everyone else. If you're one of the people who's ever felt guilty of taking such love for granted or of rejecting it in a fit of selfish self-pity, then you'd do well to watch this film in a dark cinema, because you might find that tears come to your eyes.