- Otto von Ruthless
- Oct 1, 2014
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I just watched The Overnighters. So the big twist is that he cheated on his wife, and he's gay? Here's a man making good the pillars of his faith, compassion and charity, but oh no! he also made some fairly trivial moral failings, that casts the whole thing in an entirely different light!
E: I don't mean that as a commentary on the film, which I think is good. I don't presume to know what was the director's authorial intent for including that twist. I can see how it might have been meant as an "everybody is hiding something" parallel etc. but most reviews online are treating it as this movie redefining twist which is ridiculous.
Finally caught The Overnighters and it's one of the better docs I've seen for a while. Really amazing storytelling and there are some really cool shots in it too.
I can't see any reason for not including that twist. If you're there filming and that happens, you can't just choose not to include that. It's too big a thing and that would, itself, be too selective. The film's major strength was giving you a very strong first impression and constantly asking you to re-evaluate it, firstly by considering whether his compassion is naive to a fault, and then whether his moral failing -- trivial though it may be -- affects your view of him. But in fact, the most important reason for including it is revealed in the closing captions: in an almost tragic turn, a man who's spent the last 5~ years standing on principle to support these men who came here looking to support their families now has to turn to that very industry which spawned it. He's now stuck in this community where he never really felt welcome, purely to support his family, just like every man who stayed in his church and its parking lot. "You and I are more alike than you know," he says earlier in the film. And now they aren't just alike: he's become one of them.
I think it also sheds some light on some of his other behavior I think it's probably the case that part of the reason he was so sympathetic towards the registered sex offenders is that he equates his own sexuality with their crimes. It's pretty clear that he sees homosexuality as a sin in and of itself, not just because of the dishonesty towards his family or something like that, and I think that kind of mindset could lead you to lumping all sexual sins together. It also seemed to me that the church was fairly fundamentalist - not a lot to go on for that point, but one thing that stood out to me was he was packing away some anti-evolution books as he was leaving the church.
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Apr 18, 2015 23:34
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