The end of the movie seems like the corner Kore-eda backs himself into by shooting without a script. He gets about as much out of his semi-improvisational method as a director could, but style isn't everything, especially if your ambition isn't complex enough for your style. (Also a problem in a movie like Martin Scorsese's GoodFellas.) The movie starts out feeling scrupulous and focused but becomes increasingly listless until the bizarrely decompressed ending. Kore-eda simplifies the material without shaping a story according to the forms that give simple emotional material the most force. At times Nobody Knows provides intense pathos, but given the children's situation intense pathos isn't that big an achievement.
Click here for a more impressionistic statement of Kore-eda's intentions and methods.
You can find this review and a lot besides at The Kitchen Cabinet.
Alan Dale is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies of the 1990s and Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies.
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Article comments
1 - Aaman
Phenomenal review - the film can also be seen as a paean to cities - silent, brooding, a main character in the film itself.
2 - Alan Dale
Thanks. An interesting idea about the city. It's sort of like nature: abundant but indifferent to your survival.
I meant to comment on something you said in the Million Dollar Baby thread, but the static got too loud.
You wrote with respect to structuralism: "The old 'there are only six stories, and seven characters' argument - a terrifying thought to any writer, if true."
First, I'd say that no critical idea is "true." They're just ways of organizing your thoughts and reactions to the primary material. And all ideas, all distinctions, break down at the edges (e.g., the distinction b/w periods, novels and romance, prose and poetry, fiction and non-fiction). Some break down at the center! The odd thing to me about the Million Dollar Baby hubbub was that I was essentially being called a pretentious, know-it-all prick by people who were insisting there's a right way and a wrong way to practice criticism, which I would never dream of saying. Criticism is just a way of prolonging the pleasure of the primary work it addresses--to each his own. (And don't get me started on the worthlessness of arguments ad hominem.)
Second, structuralism radically reduces the number of genres but not characters. I love applying to random works Northrop Frye's idea that there are only four planes of action in fiction--heaven, the earthly paradise, earth, and hell--and all storytelling involves either descent or ascent from one level to another. But even if you accept this as a premise, character, which seems to derive essentially from allegory, that is, from the personification of human virtues and vices, is far from being as limited.
Thanks again for the comment.