@MovieJay's Review of Restless

It's to the credit of director Gus Van Sant that Restless ultimately rises above conventionality and formula into the touching romantic drama that it is. You've seen this material before from Dying Young to Untamed Heart about the complexities involved with young people and dying. There are plenty of slice-of-life flicks to be had, but nary has there been a film that I have been able to call a slice-of-death picture. Restless  is a movie that engages us every ste p of the way with it's two quirky misfits, a young terminally ill woman and the fragile young man she shares her last romance with. Together, their love is fueled by their fascination with mortality in how we see them worshipping at the shrine of death.

Annabel is dying of cancer who after a long fight with cancer has been informed by her doctor that she has roughly three months to live. She lives in a house with her older sister Elizabeth, a woman in her mid-30's, who on the ride home back from the hospital stifles Annabel's attempt at humor almost as if to repress her own dread about the fact of having to eventually lose her baby sister. Elizabeth would rather not have to think about dealing with it while Annabel greets this news with uncommon wisdom and acceptance which immediately draws us to her.

Enoch is a young man, scrawny, awkward and shy, whose at times furtive movements with his head and eyes remind us of a bird. He lost his parents tragically in his boyhood and it appears that's where his zest and wonder for the living world was lost as well.

Traditionally in movies, characters meet in train stations and airports, libraries and shopping malls, bars and clubs. Generic places with predispositions for wacky behavior that often involve misunderstandings. Not so in Restless where the early courtship scenes take place in or outside of funeral homes and at cemeteries.

Annabel and Enoch become aware of each other as mourners at a funeral where a man employed by the funeral home begins to sniff out Enoch as an all-too-regular mourner when Annabel comes in and covers for Enoch, saving them both from further embarrassment and trouble. Outside the funeral home is where their dance begins. What is said between them in these scenes is not as important as the feeling of them. Annabel's winning heart and openness attract Enoch from the land of the dead, a place where his closest confidante is a ghost in the form of a former Japanese WWII pilot named Hiroshi.

Is Hiroshi an imaginary friend or is he a re-incarnation in Enoch's mind of someone else close to him? The movie doesn't care too much to explain this, but that's fine since we simply accept Hiroshi the way he is and the way Enoch sees him. And besides, like Annabel's older sister Elizabeth (who looks down on Enoch as a troubled slacker) Hiroshi is a character who serves as a clear-eyed counter-balance to the two young lovers and their naive hearts which have promised to put cancer and dying on the back-burner while their romance develops.

We feel like we're in good hands with Van Sant here who invests us deeply in all four major characters. From Annabel, played by Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland, Jane Eyre) with touches of sweetness and mysticism to Enoch played with tenderness in his first major film performance by Henry Hopper, son of the late Dennis Hopper, to Elizabeth and Hiroshi, the two older characters who bring weariness and realism to their roles.

I'm doubtful that Restless will find a large audience in these days where younger adult movie-goers tend to run from complexity towards the easy gratification of stuff blowing up real good. That's too bad, because this is a movie worth spending time with even if it is one of Gus Van Sant's "minor" films compared to previous titles like My Own Private Idaho, Elephant, Good Will Hunting, or Last Days. It may be "minor" Van Sant, but it is unique nonetheless in how it not only gathers our sympathy for Annabel and Enoch, but transcends it's story into a meditative experience where we are allowed as an audience to consider our own mortality. Not simply from the perspective o f "what would you do given three months to live?" but something more thoughtful having to do with how we would feel about it and whether we could come to terms with it with as much grace as young Annabel.

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