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"Winchester" Confronts the American Curse of Firearms
Excerpt of the filth below....
"It's when Eric prowls around, late at night, in parts of the house that he's told are off-limits, that the movie gets its one pure visual inspiration, one that's based in Mirren's gestural ingenuity: he spies on Sarah as she's doing some architectural drawing in a state of visionary ecstasy akin to automatic writing. That moment unlocks the film's sociopolitical inspiration: Sarah's connection with the spirits of the victims of Winchester firearms has a practical basis in documentary research. She keeps voluminous and ever-growing files of newspaper clippings about gun killings (though how she knows of the Winchester connection isn't made clear), and it's the spirits of those victims who are guiding her hand in the drawings. Under their counsel and command, she's reconstructing the rooms in which they were killed.
But of all these spirits, one is the angriest, the least reconciled, and the most violent: the spirit of a man named Benjamin Block (Eamon Farren), a Southerner whose two brothers, serving in the Confederate Army, were killed in the Civil War by Union soldiers armed with Winchester rifles. (The Spierigs also depict, briefly, other victims of Winchesters, including Native Americans and black people, one of whom is in chains—and these seemingly passive spirits are present only as silent sentinels of injustice.)
Benjamin's rage results in a high pitch of surrealistic doings that the Spierigs depict with a sly simplicity, which only the blaringly conventional score (by Peter Spierig) belies; when they depict the startling and the astonishing, they want it to be seen clearly. In "Winchester," the Spierigs have made a blunt and pissy American political film about the national curse of firearms and the unslaked, violent, destructive anger of the defeated Confederacy. It's good that "Winchester" is rated PG-13; for all its metaphysical and mythological fantasy, it's an educational film—a documentary refracted through the realm of the phantasmagoric."
Excerpt of the filth below....
"It's when Eric prowls around, late at night, in parts of the house that he's told are off-limits, that the movie gets its one pure visual inspiration, one that's based in Mirren's gestural ingenuity: he spies on Sarah as she's doing some architectural drawing in a state of visionary ecstasy akin to automatic writing. That moment unlocks the film's sociopolitical inspiration: Sarah's connection with the spirits of the victims of Winchester firearms has a practical basis in documentary research. She keeps voluminous and ever-growing files of newspaper clippings about gun killings (though how she knows of the Winchester connection isn't made clear), and it's the spirits of those victims who are guiding her hand in the drawings. Under their counsel and command, she's reconstructing the rooms in which they were killed.
But of all these spirits, one is the angriest, the least reconciled, and the most violent: the spirit of a man named Benjamin Block (Eamon Farren), a Southerner whose two brothers, serving in the Confederate Army, were killed in the Civil War by Union soldiers armed with Winchester rifles. (The Spierigs also depict, briefly, other victims of Winchesters, including Native Americans and black people, one of whom is in chains—and these seemingly passive spirits are present only as silent sentinels of injustice.)
Benjamin's rage results in a high pitch of surrealistic doings that the Spierigs depict with a sly simplicity, which only the blaringly conventional score (by Peter Spierig) belies; when they depict the startling and the astonishing, they want it to be seen clearly. In "Winchester," the Spierigs have made a blunt and pissy American political film about the national curse of firearms and the unslaked, violent, destructive anger of the defeated Confederacy. It's good that "Winchester" is rated PG-13; for all its metaphysical and mythological fantasy, it's an educational film—a documentary refracted through the realm of the phantasmagoric."
