5 February 2008
Vitus (2007)
The more I think about Vitus, the more its metaphors seem a little shoddy and forced. Like the mom, as little V is attempting to find his place after an accident, looks out upon the construction cranes. It kind of makes you gag, doesn’t it? Or the whole taking flight thing. Too bad about gravity, gramps. Weird how the roof leaks like that and yet we never see it rain.
Nevertheless, I think I liked it. It has a kind of off-charm that works, while the plot dances around its savant with the kind of mishegaas you’d expect from a such a potentially sentimental endeavor. 
I’m sure I’m not being too cynical if I suggest you could go to IMDB and find 3/4s of the comments referring to the movie’s lack of gunfire, swearwords, violence and immorality as base testimony for how good it is always in opposition to that old familiar “so what if you have to read, simpleton” subtitle argument.
Grandpa apparently played Hitler in the movie Downfall, which my ex-Patriot German highschool friend once recommended to me when I said I liked Max in spite of itself. But he’s really the reason to watch this, I think. His suggestion, after throwing his hat across the pond (despite its obvious temporaility, given he continues wearing the hat through the movie) that making choices involves letting go of something you like – in Vitus’ case, it’s “being normal” – is simplistic but believable. And much easier to vet than the whole crane, flying, hearing-aid thing, given whenever you start thinking about those things you end up squarely in a sticky morass where clichés grow on trees.
So of course the end has the kid taking care of his parents, and while I appreciated that things like that posthumous letter weren’t milked relentlessly for sentimentality, the ending did seem a bit strange to me. Imagine if you were at that concert, do you really think the audience would do that whole rolling clap thing, where it builds up to a cacophony? Maybe they were just shocked that the kid was so good, but really, wasn’t he the reason they were all there?
And the shots of his mother at the end – finally looking like herself again – serve to underlie one of the more troublesome threads moving through this thing. Does this film really understand what a goddamn terror she is? I mean, the trodding plonk of the piano score during Isabel the babysitter and Vitus’ earlier days together serve to hammer away at the dramatic irony when she gleefully announces her good news that Mom’s the new babysitter. And it’s not just that she’s a terror, she’s sort of unbelievable (in the literal sense) also. Would she really fall to pieces when Vitus normalizes given she was the one who didn’t want him in a “zoological garden” (special school for smarties)? And why, exactly, is she falling to pieces? It’s pretty clear that her ticket to further riches (and perhaps even vindication, given it seems to her now that only squandered opportunity has sprung from her loins?) has dried up, but the writing dances around it. I mean, the kid tried to commit suicide for crying out loud.
She’ll never forgive him until, of course, he just stops pretending already. Those pensive cranes are looking a better sight day in and day out. Maybe cliches will grow from those, too.