The next movie you need to see
About a year ago, I read Roger Ebert's review of Goodbye Solo. Fixated:
In Winston-Salem, N.C., a white man around 70 gets into the taxi of an African immigrant. He offers him a deal. For $1,000, paid immediately, he wants to be driven in 10 days to the top of a mountain in Blowing Rock National Park, to a place so windy that the snow falls up. He says nothing about a return trip. The driver takes the money but is not happy about this fare. He asks some questions and is told to mind his own business.
The story is set in Winston-Salem, and there is no baseball to be seen.
It took me until two and a half weeks ago to rent the movie. It took me until tonight to watch it. I haven't seen most of last year's Best Picture nominees, but it's hard to believe 10 movies were better than this one.
Rarely if ever have I been so scared through a movie that has no jump scenes. Rarely have I been so quietly and obliquely worried. Never has a taxi merging onto a highway, a little girl asleep in a back seat, a boy in the ticket window at the theater, and a cabbie riding in another cab meant so much. The direction connects the greatest lonelinesses in the self-reliant American experience — the immigrant and the aging — and finds a way beyond what you'd expect to send your heart reeling.
Ebert: "It is about how they change, which is how a great movie lifts itself above plot. … It's a great American film." We lift beyond plot.
