Besides, it isn't how the effects look that's really important, it's what they say.Īnd in "The Rapture," Tolkin takes Sharon on a terrible journey, from sin through redemption to the ultimate meaning of the rules made by God. But the budget necessary for those special effects would have compromised the film - no one would have risked that kind of money on a movie this daring. True, George Lucas or Ridley Scott could have done more with the River Styx, given several million dollars. It has been accurately observed that Tolkin's special effects in the closing sequences leave something to be desired. That being free to create any universe, he has made one that stands much in need of improvement. There, she defies God by asserting something we have all thought from time to time: That he has made us his playthings,that he has asked too much of his creatures. And the closing scenes of the movie show Sharon leaving this earth and standing on a shore between Purgatory and Heaven. Can Tolkin be leading me on? He has gone too far to lose heart now.īut Tolkin does not lose heart. If this movie doesn't leave this earth, I thought to myself, and take me to whatever is on the other shore, I will be angry and disappointed. I must be careful not to reveal too much, but let me say that when the bars began to drop from the doors of the jail cells, and fell with a clank to the stone floors, I remembered the nuns describing that final day, when the dead would rise up from the graves, and the prisoners be freed from their cells, all to face a judgment higher than man's. Would the movie lose courage, and end in some kind of sentimental compromise? Or would it go for the literal depiction of the end? Tolkin goes for it. Watching the film, I wondered how far Tolkin would go. There is even an argument for the shocking act she commits, several weeks into her vigil, although of course it is wrong - inspired by the sin of pride, of thinking she knows God's plans. One night, filled with despair, Sharon calls out in anguish to God, and is born again.Īnd then the film grows harsh and uncompromising, as she marries, has a daughter, and eventually finds herself standing under the barren desert skies with the child, waiting for the second coming of Jesus.Įverything she does is consistent with the fundamentalist view of how the world will end. She is drawn into a circle of these people, who have gathered around a young black boy who has the gift of prophecy, and informs them that the world is coming to an end. She has had the same disturbing dream, of a pearl suspended in a void. One day, she overhears co-workers whispering about their dreams. In the evenings, accompanied by her lover ( Patrick Bauchau), she cruises cocktail lounges, looking for other couples who want to "swing." They trade mates for sex that is quick, passionate and impersonal. One of dozens of anonymous voices, parceled out in cubicles in a vast room, she conducts impersonal conversations with strangers. What did we have here? "The Rapture" opens with Mimi Rogers playing Sharon, a woman who works as a phone information operator. All I knew of Michael Tolkin, who wrote and directed "The Rapture," was that he was also the author of The Player, a cold, brilliant novel about a Hollywood studio executive who commits a murder more or less by accident, and then deals with the guilt in passages of excruciating paranoia. Certainly not a film that began with casual sex, and ended with a literal depiction of a fundamentalist view of the apocalypse. 8 at the Water Tower.) Walking into the movie for the first time, last Labor Day at the Telluride Film Festival, I hardly knew what to expect. It's a film with the same ambiguity of the Thomas-Hill hearings everyone sees the same thing, but nobody can agree on what it means. There are people who love it and many who hate it, but few who can remain on the sidelines. Here is one of the most radical, infuriating, engrossing, challenging movies I've ever seen. But not until Michael Tolkin's "The Rapture" has there been a movie to seriously consider what the end of the world might be like, if the biblical prophecies turn out to be literally true. There have been dozens of movies that dealt in one way or another with the afterlife, with death and heaven and hell.
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