A little bit of Sunshine for us all....

This is not a review of the movie. This is what my feelings were after i watched the movie, how the world felt a better and brighter place after i watched the movie. These words are about that. For reviews, views etc, check out these this IMDb link to the movie.

Lets start from the very end.

When i came out watching the movie, two beautiful things were haunting me.

One was the music of the movie. An old world, eccentric music that fitted beautifully in the folds of the movie. You can check out some of the music here.

The main emotion that stayed with me was how a complex tale can be told so simply, how the theme of family, of bonding, of love, of ambition, of rift and all the little episodes that make up our lives can be told with so much compassion in less than two hours. Compassion is the key word here, because there is no judgement passed anywhere, no need for redemption for any character even though in many ways they all redeem themselves in their own eyes.

The strength of the movie is its ensemble of an eccentric family, where each member is so different and delineated that you almost start reveling in the differences before the movie had even properly warmed up. and yet for all the differences, you can almost instantly relate to each one and find a part of our lives in each character. I think the main reason for that is that all the characters are all so unaffected by their own eccentricities and of others. There is no melodrama, no pleas for normalcy. everyone is accepted for what and who they are, no matter how weird or funny it might seem at first. A perfect example for that is the vow of silence taken by Dwayne. It is taken almost sportingly by the family and its this unwordliness that paradoxically gives the movie such an earthy feeling.

The story of a group of people coming together and finding a bond when faced with obstacles is an old theme that has been used many times before. The freshness of the way the theme is dealt with here comes due to the fact that there is no cinematic plea to the audience to relate to the characters in their tribulations but as if the characters are saying, i dont give a damn whether u understand me or not, i am what i am. As i said, there is no melodrama. At times, the movie starts becoming a little gritty but even those phases are handled with a subtle and ironic sense of humour.

I love the final scene when the family gives a final push to their van (which was falling apart almost before our eyes) and we get to see their faces from inside the van and we see a bunch of faces who are at peace with the world. That the pushing of the van to get it started is used a vehicle to denote the family getting together takes a significant emotional turn at the end, when they have completed what they had started out to do, completing the trip and in the process finding a lot about themselves and their family in the process.

In the end, you come away with the feeling that your family would probably be the best people you would get to know, only if you try and get to know theme better. Thats the film's gift to us.