Lenny's girlfriend banged on the table while doing her nails, and wiped off a dozen bottles of nail polish on the table. Bottles and cans fell to the ground with a crackling sound. After Lenny's girlfriend passed away, her children sat opposite John and Wendy who had arrived and told them that because their parents were not married, please take Lenny away.
The unsuccessful daughter Wendy, who has repeatedly applied for the Guggenheim Literary Fund, lives alone in New York, has a cat, a dog, and a pot of grass. She has an affair with a 52-year-old married man who is more than ten years older than herself, and likes it. Do aerobics on TV in the room in the morning. Wendy called her emotional out-of-control a mid-life crisis. The symptom was that she still told her boyfriend that her cervix problem was not small even when the defendant was told that the cervical examination was all right.
His son, John, who has a golden face, a big beard and high cholesterol, is a PhD in literature and teaches English at the university. He hangs a three-liter water bag every night to do spinal traction for half an hour to relieve his pressure. Like Wendy, he has repeatedly applied for the Guggenheim Fund without success. At breakfast, John would cry when his Polish girlfriend made him an omelette, but for many years he had been trapped in the shadow of being beaten and scolded by his father as a child and neglected to contact his father.
Before leaving Sun City, Wendy opened the box he had been carrying with his father while packing his father's luggage, which contained photos of their brother and sister when they were young. She called her brother and felt that they actually have the love of her father. Wendy took away his father's girlfriend's antidepressants when he went out and took one pill decisively. She was looking at the scenery outside the window in the taxi. The trees on the roadside were lush and mellow with the singing of birds. A smile unknowingly crawled across his cheeks, and a blush rose. Wendy found a way to comfort herself.
On the plane to Boston, my father thumped the table and yelled to go to the toilet, overturning the food in front of him. Wendy unfastened his seat belt in a panic, took his father's hand and moved step by step toward the toilet. Father's loose pants fell without warning, revealing the wrapped diapers. Wendy faced the gazes of people on the plane awkwardly, lowered his body, and put the pants on his father. Wendy hated his brother when he got out of the airport. How could he not get out of the car to help after he suffered so many grievances, and privately decided not to take care of his father and sent him to the nursing home he chose.
The father sitting in John's car looked sad.
The days seemed to get colder after the three came to Boston. The conditions of the new sanatorium are average. The walls are gray, the quilt is dry, and the pillows always collapse on the bed. The caregivers with almost all black faces greeted them enthusiastically in Latin American English. His father's face was puzzled, Wendy was a little uneasy, and John didn't seem to feel anything wrong. Jimmy, the black man in charge of his father's sleep, approached Lenny with a smile and said, "Do you want a good night's sleep, Mr. Savage?" Then raise your hands, raise your hands, like you were arrested. Have you never been arrested? Lenny raised his hand obediently, and Jimmy took off his clothes. Jimmy is a cute boy, but Wendy and Lenny seem to be unhappy.
Late at night, the brothers and sisters left the nursing home, Wendy said to John angrily while wiping surging tears, we are bad people, we are very bad, very bad people!
In the cafe of the nursing home, the siblings sat opposite their father. John prepared a hearing aid for his father and asked him to wear it. In order to fill in the back-up information of the nursing home, John must ask his father some unspeakable questions in order to deal with the unexpected future of his father. He cleared his throat and lowered his head and asked, if something happens in the future, do you want a machine to sustain life? Father asked what happened? Wendy said quickly that nothing will happen. John paused for a while and continued to ask, if something unfortunate happens, for example, you continue to be in a coma...the incomprehension and anger on his father's face, then kill me! John took a deep breath and said, what should we do if you die? My father is even more angry this time, so he will bury me! Are you idiots? Buried me! After that, the three people fell into a long silence.
Wendy's continued guilt made her desperate to take her father to a better nursing home, but she was still disappointed. Standing in the cold wind, John said to Wendy that you are too selfish to do this, not for father at all, just to relieve your own guilt. You think this place is good, but you are just a consumer in their eyes. They use beautiful scenery and good service to help you relieve your guilt, but you dare not face people dying. Just like the ugliest side of the most beautiful building, these beautiful scenery services are all designed to confuse the fact that people will die. Death is unspecific but also the most real, accompanied by rot and stench. Wendy glanced at the nursing home in front of him and turned to leave.
Wendy had to face the reality, her love affair was not perfect, her writing did not improve, and her life was a mess. It seems that her hard work is always unrequited, and it can't attract the attention and support of others. It was like the red pillow she gave to her father, but in the end he pushed it away again and again and then threw it to the ground. Of course Wendy was sad. She carried the box containing the cat and walked out of the nursing home grievancely, and met Jimmy there, and the two leaned against the wall to smoke together. Jimmy told her that her father was getting better because his toes were already moving. Jimmy liked to tease her cat, and asked her to read the script she wrote. Wendy felt very comforted.
John finally found out that she lied that she had obtained the Guggenheim Fund and chattered about it. Wendy felt extremely humiliated. Two people quarreled loudly in the car. Father turned off the hearing aid, put on a coat and hat, and turned his head and looked out the window. At this time, a cemetery slowly entered in front of the bare tree shadows, and his father closed his eyes.
His father's condition worsened, and the siblings rushed to the hospital and stayed with him for one night. In the morning Wendy tried to shake his father's hand, but found that his hand was cold. Wendy woke up John and asked him with tears in his eyes, did he leave like this? Standing next to him, John has a hoarse voice, yes.
Wendy cleaned up his father's house, refused her boyfriend's hug, and changed the habit of doing aerobics at home, taking her dog out for a run every morning. Half a year after his father left, Wendy's script was performed in a theater in New York. John, who was watching the rehearsal, burst into tears when he saw the scene of his childhood father beating himself in the script. When leaving the theater, John told Wendy that he decided to go to Poland to find his girlfriend.
The end of the movie makes us feel relieved and feel that life will be very good in the future, although we still think of their father's sad eyes in the car when we inadvertently.
Recalling the small red liquid lamp that spit out orange bubbles that appeared repeatedly in the movie, a similar lamp appeared in "Lost Tokyo". In the movie, when people are very sad and lost, the camera will always move slowly towards that lamp. One by one, orange bubbles rose swayingly, warmly. Why don't we want to have a warmth for ourselves to be extravagant when we are most helpless. No one’s life can be perfect or do what we want, we sometimes find that we are in love with someone when we are about to lose it. But there is nothing to regret, because this kind of love will not be less because it is discovered one day later. Whether we can stay warm with us depends entirely on our own hearts.
09.18.08
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