Man From Earth

 

Last month, at LuLu's suggestion, I watched Man From Earth.  It's a film set largely in a single living room, where five friends come together to say goodbye to a departing colleague, John Oldman. At the party John tells his friends that he is 14,000 years old, a survivor of the Stone Age who changes location every ten years to avoid detection. What follows is an intellectual discussion among the group that occasionally rises to the level of anger and violence, as they try to determine whether their friend is a medical marvel - or a liar. 

This movie is highly lauded, and Lu enjoyed it, but I thought it missed the mark. It wasn't bad, it was just . . . well, awkward. 

The small setting, the cast of friends that are suspiciously diverse in attitude, thought, and personality,  the dialogue-driven script, it all says "stage play" to me, not movie. 

Which is fine, but even as a play I think it falters. Remember what I said about the friends, how they were all so different as to make you wonder why they are friends at all? As the story goes on and they settle more into archetypical roles the friends feel more and more like they are there to justify to the audience why John is speaking; no, lecturing. 

SPOILER:

 I was also annoyed by the random brushes with the famous: Van Gogh, Columbus, Buddha, and let us not forget his assertion that he himself is Jesus Christ. Here, you may rightfully wonder if the film lost me with John's sacrilegious boast. No. Perhaps it would have, had the claim not struck so many other sour notes with me. He's of European ancestry, going back 12,000 years at that point, studied under Buddha, dismissed the idea of God, or at least an active God - yet he somehow chose to immerse himself in ancient Israel, living the life of a devout Jew? For what? Why? How did he pass? Not for the purpose of "becoming Jesus," because he makes it clear he wanted nothing of the sort. Nonsensical. 

END SPOILER

My beefs aside, it was entertaining enough, and I don't regret seeing it. I grade this a C+