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Heights (2004/5) - A Hollywood Jesus Movie Review
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| There is a sense in which watching film is an exercise in voyeurism. We are looking at a world that we are not a part of. Good film can draw us into that world and make us feel a part of it, or at least help us to understand our connection to that world. There is nothing wrong with this kind of voyeurism in film. Indeed, it is one of the three V’s that make up film. (Jon Boorstin refers to the “voyeur’s eye,” the “vicarious eye,” and the “visceral eye.”) |
(2004/5) Film Review |
| This
page was created on August 8, 2005
This page was last updated on
September 6, 2005
—Overview
—Photos
—About this Film pdf
—Spiritual Connections
Dial up modems will take a few moments
—Review by ELISABETH LEITCH
—Review by DARREL MANSON
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| CREDITS |
| Directed by Chris Terrio
Screenplay by Amy Fox
Additional written material by Chris Terrio
Cast (in credits order)
Chandler Williams .... Juilliard Macbeth
Bess Wohl .... Juilliard Lady Macbeth
Glenn Close .... Diana
Elizabeth Banks .... Isabel
James Marsden .... Jonathan
Jesse Bradford .... Alec
Daniel Neiden .... Wedding Rabbi
Thomas Lennon .... Marshall (as Tom Lennon)
Matthew Davis .... Mark (as Matt Davis)
John Light .... Peter
Isabella Rossellini .... Liz
Susan Malick .... Rachel
Rachel Siegel .... Autograph Seeker
Katie Kreisler .... Helen
Philip Tabor .... Paul (as Phil Tabor)
Jordi Vilasuso .... Benjamin's Ex
Joel De La Fuente .... Nat DeWolf
Melanie R. Orr .... Scorned Woman
Denis O'Hare .... Andrew
Rufus Wainwright .... Jeremy
Eric Bogosian .... Henry
George Segal .... Rabbi Mendel
Angel Desai .... Laura
Jonathan Walker .... Michael
Regina McMahon .... Amanda
Michael Murphy .... Jesse
Produced by
Richard Hawley .... producer
James Ivory .... producer
Ismail Merchant .... producer
Pierre Proner .... associate producer
John P. Scholz .... line producer
Kai Wong .... assistant producer
Original Music by Ben Butler and Martin Erskine
Cinematography by Jim Denault
Film Editing by Sloane Klevin
MPAA: Rated R for language, brief sexuality and nudity.
Runtime: USA:93 min
For rating reasons, go to FILMRATINGS.COM, and MPAA.ORG.
Parents, please refer to PARENTALGUIDE.ORG
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| TRAILERS AND CLIPS |
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| SYNOPSIS |
 "Heights" follows five characters over twenty-four hours on a fall day in New York City. Isabel (Elizabeth Banks), a photographer, is having second thoughts about her upcoming marriage to Jonathan (James Marsden), a lawyer.
On the same day, Isabel's mother Diana (Glenn Close) learns that her husband has a new lover, and begins to re-think her life choices and her open marriage.
Diana and Isabel's paths cross with Alec (Jesse Bradford), a young actor, and with Peter (John Light), a journalist.
As the interrelated stories proceed, the connections between the lives of the five characters begin to reveal themselves and their stories unravel so that Isabel, Jonathan, Diana, Alec, and Peter must choose what kind of lives they will lead before the sun comes up on the next day. |
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There are so many ways a relationship can be or go wrong. So many reasons and so many motivations that make our connections with those around us far from right, good, or even real. It is something we don’t like to think about, something we don’t like to recognize, but if we are truthful, the reality we must face is that these sub-par relationships are too often the norm and too seldom the exception.
In the movie Heights, this reality is what a group of New Yorkers must face. They each lead separate lives, yet they are also connected. Some are connected by apparent bonds, others by bonds kept hidden. During the 24 hours that the film represents, every connection and intersecting relationship between a young man, his fiancée, her mother, their upstairs neighbor, and a famous photographer is exposed.
At the beginning of the movie, an ex-boyfriend (Mark) reunites with Isabel, Jonathan’s fiancée. They are talking about her wedding, more specifically her ring, and Mark asks her how it feels. Her response—“Heavy.” And more than she knows it, that single word describes what she and those around her will deal with in the hours to come.
For Isabel and Jonathan, their impending life together is exciting, but it also weighs upon them. Isabel struggles with the idea of becoming “just” a wife. She loses her job because of her wedding schedule, has to turn down and dream job for the same reason, and wonders what she is going to do now. As a photographer, she has always sought images depicting moments of value, relationships of true connection, and lives that matter. Yet, putting her camera down after a woman yells at her, all Isabel can think about is how the only meaning she can seem to find is never on her side of the camera.
 Her fiancé Jonathan is also having a difficult day. In messages on his answering machine, his past comes back to haunt him. It is a past he has tried bury and hide, a past that threatens the life he has planned out before him. The problem is, his past is making its way back to him on more paths than one. His bigger problem—the past that he has kept hidden is also manifest in his present, directly opposing his life ahead, carefully hidden from those around him, but too alive to keep that way.
Watching from a distance and being drawn into her daughter’s life more than she realizes, Isabel’s mother Diana also carries around a heavy burden. Her husband is cheating on her. It is an act not exactly forbidden by their open marriage, but this time she wishes she could have a relationship that she could depend on, a relationship she knew was actually real. She knows that the connection she has with her husband is not one of love and, inside her, she knows that that is what she truly needs. She argues with her daughter about wedding dresses and about how Isabel never talks to her about Jonathan. And, as she takes her own mental photographs of the little she sees of Isabel, she worries that the life her daughter is heading towards is no more founded in actual love than her own.
From its beginning to its end, Heights is filled with heavy situations and relationships that, sadly, just don’t cut it. Unlike other relationship movies where characters selfishly pursue destructive relationships like a game, the characters in Heights meet the reality of less than optimal relationships with sadness, confusion, loneliness, and a desire for something more, something better, something that is truly good.
The relationships in the movie span a wide range, a range that only begins to reflect the variety of relationships that exist in the real world. Looking at the movie and the real world, many people will automatically categorize relationships, slap on a prefabricated label, and far too hastily condemn “bad” relationships simply because of the categories of “guaranteed” dysfunctionality they occupy. A movie of emotional depth, however, Heights pushes us to recognize that the problems we face in relationships are never as simple as surface generalizations.
In real life, we enter into relationships for many reasons. Sometimes all we want is someone to depend on or someone to depend upon us. Sometimes it is money, status, the right name, the right life, the right image. It is living up to a certain expectations. It is never questioning a specific role we have always felt we have to play. Too often, it is giving into confusion, giving up on anything better, and simply settling for what seems to meet the demands of the moment. Most of the time there is desire, strong desire, attraction, and fun…but as Heights shows us, alone, even desire is not strong enough to hold a relationship together.
 The problem with most of the relationships in Heights is that, although they are romantic, although there is desire, none of them seem to truly know love. Few of the characters look out for others; most of them have themselves at the top of their list. Truth is not a requirement and neither is commitment. Often, the only requirement seems to be the inability to believe in anything better. The characters know that love is not there. They show this hole in their lives through their sadness, confusion, loneliness, and longing for something more. They long for something more and something better, because thankfully, beyond confusion, stand-alone desire, and inadequate motivations, there is something better.
While Diane does not exactly have a stellar record with relationships, as a mother, she does not want Isabel to settle for anything but the best. She knows that we need love and she does not want her daughter to live without it. In the same way, God, a father who cares about us more than we can imagine, does not want us to fill our lives with relationships based on and defined by anything other than true love.
 Although God created desire within us, desire is only part of the relationships he hopes for us to fill our lives with. In the same way that his love for us is sacrificial, selfless, honest, and patient, in same way that his love seeks, hopes, and perseveres with us through anything and towards lives of meaning, purpose, and value, God desires the bonds we form with those around us to strive for nothing less. God did not fill us with a desire for love for no reason. He filled us with that desire that we might seek genuine love and seek to genuinely love others.
As we seek lives of purpose, meaning, and value, it only makes sense that relationships that are truly good, relationships that are actually based on love, will not just be, but live to pursue, grow, and forward that life of purpose and meaning together, building each other up, helping each other grow, and remembering to share the love that God gives to us every day with those around us. As a man Isabel meets at her mother’s party says to her, neither God nor us wants to look back on our relationships and lives and regretfully wonder, what happened? God wants us to be able to look at our lives and our relationships and know that what is happening is love.
—Comment on the blog
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There is a sense in which watching film is an exercise in voyeurism. We are looking at a world that we are not a part of. Good film can draw us into that world and make us feel a part of it, or at least help us to understand our connection to that world. There is nothing wrong with this kind of voyeurism in film. Indeed, it is one of the three V’s that make up film. (Jon Boorstin refers to the “voyeur’s eye,” the “vicarious eye,” and the “visceral eye.”)
Heights is a film built around voyeurism. The opening scene is watching a class rehearse a scene from Macbeth. So we are in the position of watching a class watch a play. We are being voyeurs in the second degree. Diana is a renowned actor getting ready to play Lady Macbeth on Broadway. We see her rehearse. We see her audition an actor for an Off-Broadway play she will direct. Always, she is busy being something other than who she really is – even at her own birthday party.
 Her daughter Isabel is a photographer – a voyeuristic profession. Again, we watch her taking pictures and we become second degree voyeurs yet again. She keeps trying to find something interesting to photograph, but has no sense of interest in her own life.
There is even a scene in the film in which Alec, an aspiring actor, is working as a waiter at a sexual voyeur party. We see him seeing others watching others. We are voyeurs of the third degree.
As voyeurs, we see the secrets that the characters hide from everyone else. We want to see their passion, but instead we only see the ways they lock that passion away. Diana knows how to bring passion to the stage, but has no way of showing her anger over her husband’s affair or her fear for Isabel’s potentially disastrous marriage. Isabel has a chance to do important work, but meekly sets it aside because of her upcoming wedding. Her fiancé Jonathan, when asked if what he has with Isabel is real, answers, “It’s close enough.”
We spend the film watching the lives of various people interact, but we are always at a distance, peeping in a window (actually more like watching someone peeping), so to speak, without really encountering who these people are. All we see is the misery and pain that fill their lives. But we are kept at such a distance that we aren’t really able to connect with their lives, perhaps because they have such trouble connecting with their own lives.
That distance between audience and film becomes a problem. Instead of being able to find some way to participate in the story, we end up being nothing more than bystanders watching the bleeding souls of these unhappy people. And they are unhappy. The best that can be said is that by the end of the story they know the unhappiness that has always been there.
There is a bit of hope offered for a few of the characters, but it is such a faint light, that the viewer knows that it will not burn long, and eventually what bit of happiness might have come is doomed because these people just don’t know how to be happy.
So for all our watching, we come away frustrated. The nature of voyeurism is that we want to see something that we want for ourselves. In this film we only see miserable people become more miserable as their facades fall away. The window we are looking into gives us a glimpse into a Sartrean Hell.
—Comment on the blog
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