Obits

April: “You know he’s the first person who seemed to know what we were talking about.”
Frank: “It’s true isn’t it? Maybe we’re as crazy as he is.”

April: “If being crazy means living life as if it matters, then I don’t mind being completely insane.”

Now here’s a tragedy. In the fight against the norm – the courageous idealist dies in defeat. The one who gives in becomes a zombie. And the one who has actually survived, calls the asylum home, a prisoner in his own dreams.


The Wheelers announce over tea: We’ve decided to live in Paris. We’re leaving in the fall. Frank will take some time off to think about what he really wants, while April gets a high-paying secretarial job to support the family and we’ll live happily ever after. Middle-class eyebrows raise in mockery. And/or pity.

In this fight against conformity, when many lives are at stake, what is the real key to victory and survival? With circumstances that the Wheelers had, could it have been a happy medium? He takes the promotion, she bears their third child – they stay put for a year or two and save up until they can afford to take a year-long hiatus in most-coveted Paris. Have fun and then take it from there. A self-help book might have given that advice. But that, too, assumes the unrealistic happy ever after (and that is, if they stayed married – otherwise, their marriage would have been the casualty).

Who knows? Maybe winning and surviving is in the way one sees and believes it. I’m just thinking too much. Out loud.

It’s just that at this point in my life that I have gone a little bit “crazy” myself, all I can say about this movie is, ouch!


* Image courtesy of Wikipedia.