A film critique, because I have to.

Even though I have a great love of cinema and do have opinions and criticisms of films, I do not usually offer up a critique unless moved to do so. This film did more than move me. It jolted and jerked my head around like a drug. As if, once I understood what was happening, all I could do was go along for the ride.

"The Letter" starring Winona Ryder and James Franco

For me, this film is an exercise in minimal dialogue cinema, evocative of uneasy tenderness and mistrust in the realm of relationship. The audience rides along with Winona's character down the slippery slope of schizophrenia and palpable paranoia. There is tension in the details and silence of this film. I find it to be a magnificent use of characters that you don't really care about at all, but a story that you kind of do. You can't help it but you do care. You care in a similar way as when you gaze at an auto accident as you drive by. The twists and turns are simply dizzying. They are mostly psychological, but dizzying none the less. "Quirky" doesn't fit at all because "quirky" usually carries with it a sense of levity, large or small, some "lift” of some sort. This film does NOT have that "lift", yet seems to exude all the "quirk" anyone would need.

Technically, "The Letter" stirs the pot of editing tricks, and pacing, and sequence, and order or lack thereof. Carried out with excellent use of silence and hesitation, "The Letter" is an aural adventure to say the least of its sound design. Performances are genuinely hard to gauge as character traits are to be discovered instead of portrayed. Franco seems great. Ms. Ryder is stunning and magnetically pitiful in her role as New York playwright "guiding" a workshop theater group towards, well towards something I think. She provides her actors with new dialogue daily, writing as she unravels, thus confusing almost everyone. I'm not in any hurry to watch this one again, but I will definitely want to in the future.

"I felt the shadows across my skin, and I watched." - Last line of the film.

There is much more that could be said about this film, but I can't continue right now. It's all still soaking in. See this one if you can find it.