Too much of everything

Simply Perfect

Great Film overall

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

After the famous poet, Elizabeth Bishop, is greatly mentored by the star poet Robert Lowell, she, travels to Brazil, on her inheritance, has a love affair with a wealthy, female architect, who is in another love relationship with a former fellow student of Bishop's at Vassar College, called Mary. This threesome love relationship fails because each person involved in this relationship has a main flaw. Bishop's flaw is alcoholism. The architect's flaw is that she works herself to the point of mental insanity. Mary's flaw is jealousy. She does not want to share her architect girlfriend with Elizabeth Bishop, understandably.When watching the film in the cinema, yesterday, with the oranges and the red wine, I bought at the booth, all of us clapped at the end of the film, with wonderful actors, very beautiful scenery of Brazil as well as fantastic architecture, before tortillas, guacamole, nachos, corona and other Latin American snacks that were cheaply sold outside.This positive account begs the question, why I did not rate that film to be so good. Like many art-house or like many artsy films, Reaching for the Moon, we hardly know who most of the characters in this film truly are. There is just not enough character development in the film. We do not know what exactly makes Miss Bishop travel, why she loves this architect, why the architect loves her and why Mary loves this architect. We also do not know their views about belonging to a sexual minority. We do not know the reason for their flaws, such as the traumatic experiences that made Miss Bishop an alcoholic, what made the architect a workaholic, who does not talk to her family, and we know almost nothing about this third girl Mary, except that she went to University with Miss Bishop.We do not know the exact cause or even the nature of the architect's insanity. When she kills herself, she leaves no note, and nobody even asks or tries to find out why the hell she did it or if it was an accident. Like most films about poetry little attention is paid to the kind of Poetry Miss Bishop wrote, so that when she wins the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, in the film, you still end up leaving the movie theatre wondering why her poetry was considered to be so special, apart from the fact that she was rich, well educated and knew some of the greatest poets like Robert Lowell and Marian Moore. This film is full of paper Mache' characters, in which you hardly know who the people in the film are, despite the strong attempts of the actors in the film to act as well as possible, which made the film worth watching, especially as a poet and author myself, amongst other things.

However truthful to Elizabeth Bishop's tragic love affair with Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares, Bruno Barreto's Reaching for the Moon is more generally engaged with the question: Is the examined life worth suffering?In this corner, Elizabeth (Miranda Otto), a wan, fragile, painfully timid and insecure poet who is mortified to hear one of her poems read aloud. In her insecurity and sense of powerlessness she is Woman. She dresses like an office manager's wife and wears her hair tight to her face. She compulsively observes and anatomizes her observations. Her life is at first nothing but her examining it.In contrast Lota has a large strong face, flowing long hair, a man's stocky build, and a man's aggressive stride and nature. She never questions herself or her impulses and she has the money not just to do what she wants but to get others to do so too. When she tells Elizabeth that she and her current amour, Elizabeth's college friend Mary (Tracy Middendorf), were just roommates, she admits Mary hasn't thought that. Probably Lota hasn't either. To draw Mary back into her fold as a friend Lota buys her a child. Lota is also creative, designing her sumptuous country estate and — after she helps friend Carlos (Marcello Airoldi) get elected Governor — designs and supervises the construction of a large public park, with towering standards to provide the magic of moonlight. But she's not a thinker, a meditator. She just acts. Not given to self-analysis, when the new guest Elizabeth arrives Lota leaps to wrong conclusions about her.Part of their antithesis is cultural. As Elizabeth drunkenly tells the Rio audience at her National Book Awards dinner, "How can someone raised in the desert swim like a fish?" The withdrawn Elizabeth doesn't understand the Brazilian exuberance, constant joy, and carefreeness, as they celebrate everything — even after the military coup has reduced their freedoms.But the contrast is mainly in the women's character. Still, though Lota is the first to express her love for Elizabeth — which the poet only reciprocates when Lota is asleep — in their first clinch Elizabeth assumes the ardent initiative. And despite -- or because of -- her relentless analyzing, Elizabeth is an alcoholic.With her deep pessimism and self-doubt, Elizabeth stumbles from success to success: the Pulitzer, the NBA, a slot in The New Yorker, the man Aldous Huxley's approval, a teaching gig at NYU. Her life examining works for her. But the ebullient, confident Lota breaks down at her first defeat: the new government corrupts her vision of the park, converting it into the cliché sterile paved soccer court. When Elizabeth asks if her going to New York caused Lota's depression, Mary clearly blames the ruin of her project. "How could you think anyone could be that confident?"For her part, Mary begins as a jejeune, non-thinking sort who doesn't expect her college friend to steal her lover. Dumped, Mary realizes she has "no other option" than to love Lota. But by film end she has learned to read people and situations. Motherhood may have taught her wariness. When she aborts Elizabeth's correspondence with Lota it is not out of selfish malice, but because she knows that Lota's losing Elizabeth again would destroy her. Events prove her right.Hence the poem Elizabeth ends too soon at the start of the film and rounds out at the end. "The art of losing isn't hard to master." Not if you're a thinker. The frightened self- doubter sees enough loss to handle her own and not just thrive but survive. The robust willful woman who never paused to consider human vulnerability is defeated by her first loss — and kills herself at the second.

Reaching for the Moon is the kind of movie everyone hopes for but no one makes: a gay romance where "gay romance" is not the premise. Director Bruno Barreto focuses instead on how Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares challenged and changed the world and each other in other ways, and that was absolutely the right choice - these women and their story are fascinating and make for top class entertainment.And it is entertaining. Considering the characters' issues and the story's ending it could have been drab, but the film is always lively and engaging. It flies by. Bishop takes herself very seriously, but Barreto maintains a sense of humor about it and makes fun of her just enough to keep her melodrama under control. An added bonus is that Miranda Otto gets to show off her underrated and underused comedic chops; one particular drunk scene is priceless. Glória Pires is dynamic and fiery as Lota but Otto is the real star, channeling Greta Garbo and Deborah Kerr in a gracefully commanding performance. She doesn't shy away from Bishop's spikiness, but her screen presence is so compelling that as much as we might be frustrated with her character, we can't take our eyes off her. Thanks to her constantly surprising performance, an eclectic ensemble cast, breathtaking visuals, and assured direction, Reaching for the Moon pulses with energy and is a breath of fresh air in an era of stuffy and bland biopics. Highlights: Shots of Rio de Janeiro that belong on postcards; a performance from Miranda Otto that would have won an Oscar in 1937; the assertion that some things are more important than whether a person is gayVerdict: Watch this with your parents instead of Blue Is the Warmest Color

I enjoyed this story of a lengthy midlife love affair, "based on" (that is, "not cemented to the known facts of") real women of some mid-century renown. One, American poet Elizabeth Bishop, is quiet, slow to warm to strangers or share working drafts of her poems. See if Miranda Otto doesn't remind you of Deborah Kerr in her memorable 1940s and '50s roles (and clothes). In Brazil to visit an old college friend, Elizabeth meets Lota de Macedo Soares, a charismatic commander of attention and glamorously trousered architect. They become lovers and make their life in Brazil. All the characters, including a close male friend of Lota's and one of Elizabeth's, are revelations in the best sense: mature but unfinished adults, they meet their circumstances over nearly 20 years in ways not even they might be able to predict. Mark Twain said that fiction is obliged to meet our expectations but the truth isn't. Central Casting can provide "types," but history offers people like nobody else, which is why you'll find discussions here and elsewhere complaining that these lesbians were not put through their proper lesbian plot paces! The drunks were sometimes sober! People got depressed without enough foreshadowing! Ignore all that. This is a good quiet story, mostly but not all sad, about people learning themselves as they go, living genuinely if not always bravely. And anyone who's ever dreamed of having a writer's sanctuary will fall rapturously in love with the al fresco study Lota builds for Elizabeth. Must be seen to be appreciated!