Electric wires as a metaphor for connections, chemistry, emotional charges, jolts, the ebb of life. Seems unlikely?
Robert de Niro plays a gracefully ageing father of four who just lost his wife 8 months ago. He invented the coating for electric wires that span America, connecting cities and people like dots. The wires stayed the same all these years, but everything else changed. His busy children-dominated phase passes into one of tranquility and loneliness, companionship gives way to solitariness, and children don’t tell him the whole truth any more. Spread all over America, but staying connected through the wires that he invented, they stay in touch with each other slightly more than with Dad, each caught up in his life, each fighting his own battle at some front. When, for different reasons, they are all unable to make it to his invitation, Dad decides to pack his bags and travel to them.
The journey brings growth, release, and forgiveness. He is agitated that the children wouldn’t share with him like they did with their mom- he taking over her role of ‘keeping an eye’ on them all. They never seem to let him in on the whole truth, always touching things up, leaving out the ‘bad parts’ and only passing on the good ones, and making them up when they don’t exist. Of course, he’s smarter than they make him out to be; he just didn’t work hard enough on using the connection wires, he was so busy inventing them. So, while signs betray the children’s personal conflicts, he searches a way to connect with them and to take over from where his wife left off. It doesn’t come without learning, for while with mom, anything went, with Dad, there was always the pressure to please, to prove themselves, and to be worthy of all he did for them.
There is an electric charge around wires, and when you tap into their energy field, you find ways to connect. The answer comes to him in an epiphany, and with a sudden intuition, he understands and accepts them in the fullest way, like Mom did: ‘acting as if nothing’s wrong’. Just this strength was needed: to forgive them their human fibs and foibles, and take them all in without judgement and without pressure, in a great embrace of love- strength enough to accept the death of one son, an artist, who exorcised his personal demons through art, haunted as much by the great awe in which he held his Dad as by his deep desire to fulfill his expectations.
People come and go, but ideas stay like wires, or paintings of them. Like one, beautiful and final tribute to his father’s achievement in the somewhat cryptic painting of swirls of twining electric wires that the deceased artist leaves behind, rhythmically flowing over a snow-covered house. Yes, this constant movement through the continuum of space, this uninterrupted rhythm, is a metaphor for life. It is a constant reminder as it hangs in the background while the family finds a way to move forward through loss, conflict, relearning and re-discovering, softly, easily and ever so continuously.
The film is a subtle but beautiful sequence of images and the music of silence. The cinematography is of the highest order, and the music of silence is an aural treat. A delicately crafted piece overall, and one that we will all need to keep coming back to.
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