Personally, as I wrote some time ago, I liked
MWG -- a lot. I understand Sayles' view/vantagepoint, and liberal
hand-wringing is, of course, requisite. I liked the fellow that
played the retired doctor a lot. He brought something to a kind
of 2-D role -- rich guy motoring, devolving, further, further. .
. and it's never too late for an education. I liked the "We
are the salt people. They're the dirt people," etc.
It was a convenient, simple way to show how
people/party/demographic/historical/ neighborhood -- you name it
-- lines are drawn.
"It is very simple, you see. I live here,
in this brown house. X over there, he lives in a green house. He
cannot understand one that lives in a brown house. I cannot
understand one that lives in a green house. Brown and green --
there is no dialogue. There is no symmetry. I am alone, in my
brown house."
The dialectic Indianspeak only furthered that
sense of distance. Being in the audience and understanding only
basic Spanish, spoken slowly, furthered My sense of never having
a chimera's chance of understanding, truly, others' lives, no
matter how close they may reside.
The boorish American was played, pretty damn
well, by Mandy Patinkin. Sayles never played them out
appropriately, (like lining them up against a fence and shooting
them; or Mandy becoming a neanderthal), but did use them for the
tagline/epilogue, along with the girls on holiday.
Ending a tad trite, and $$-conscious, but I did
like it. And the ghost made me want to cry.
