Three people meet, walk around and talk on the beach, with the monumental Mont-St.-Michel looming over them. They are an American poet in exile (John Heard), a frustrated politician (Sam Waterston), and a disillusioned physicist (Liv Ullman). It's sort of wintry and bleak at Mont-St.-Michel, which looks as imposing and impenetrable from the inside as it does from a distance, a great Disneyland castle of a place, perched on and overgrowing an island that becomes part of the mainland at low tide. As good a place to talk as any. You surely don't have to worry about being overwhelmed by the sounds of traffic because here, among the stone walls and spires, the internal combustion engine doesn't seem to have been invented yet.
So what do they talk about, these three charming characters? Well, it's mostly a lecture by Ullman's physicist. She delivers it the way Carl Sagan pitched his material in "Cosmos." She covers quite a lot of ground but it's not hard to follow, although it may make you wish you'd paid more attention in Mrs. Abigail von Bulk's class in Physics. Ullman winds up promoting a holistic view of the planet. Nothing evolves. Everything co-evolves, and our thinking is short sighted. We are what Tielhard de Chardin called "the thinking part of the earth." An American Indian tribe (she claims) takes action only when it has thought about the consequences of that action for the seventh generation from now. Well, I couldn't agree more with her about that. Ullman seems so good-natured, even in her skepticism, that it keeps the freshet of ideas from becoming somniferous.
Heard and Waterston have less to do. "So what does all this mean?", asks Waterston. And Heard gets to illustrate some of Ullman's points by quoting Pablo Neruda or playing a chord on an organ to illustrate that individual notes acquire a different meaning when they are played together at the same time.
The film has the three characters wander around inside and out, squatting on the sand, having lunch, but doesn't do much to break up the rhythm. It's all cheerful and pleasant and filled with the wonder of it all but it doesn't have much going for it besides its intellectual verve and its unimpeachable acting. These sorts of ideas are squeezed out like toothpaste throughout the film, the gravity of the subjects never quite overcoming the ordinariness of their expression. I wish they'd have added a fourth character who was a Dadaist or an aging member of Andy Warhol's Factory or a stand-up comic. Maybe Little Richard.
I suspect the ultimate goal was not so much to teach the public that atoms are indeed very small, but that everything we do has moral overtones. Most of what we do in the way of scientific research, says Ullman, is paid for by the Pentagon, and we turn the responsibility for using our results back to the people who paid us. And of course the scientists and the Pentagon -- and poets and politicians, as well -- are us. Florence Kluckhohn outlined three ways of adapting to nature: (1) subjugating ourselves to it, (2) living in harmony with it, or (3) conquering it. Ullman plumps for living in harmony with it, of course, but although it sounds suspiciously platitudinous we WILL get politicians standing on earth scorched by forest fires or cities swept away by floods and declaring nature an "enemy." Here's a quote from another egghead -- Pogo the Possum: "We have met the enemy and he is us."
So what do they talk about, these three charming characters? Well, it's mostly a lecture by Ullman's physicist. She delivers it the way Carl Sagan pitched his material in "Cosmos." She covers quite a lot of ground but it's not hard to follow, although it may make you wish you'd paid more attention in Mrs. Abigail von Bulk's class in Physics. Ullman winds up promoting a holistic view of the planet. Nothing evolves. Everything co-evolves, and our thinking is short sighted. We are what Tielhard de Chardin called "the thinking part of the earth." An American Indian tribe (she claims) takes action only when it has thought about the consequences of that action for the seventh generation from now. Well, I couldn't agree more with her about that. Ullman seems so good-natured, even in her skepticism, that it keeps the freshet of ideas from becoming somniferous.
Heard and Waterston have less to do. "So what does all this mean?", asks Waterston. And Heard gets to illustrate some of Ullman's points by quoting Pablo Neruda or playing a chord on an organ to illustrate that individual notes acquire a different meaning when they are played together at the same time.
The film has the three characters wander around inside and out, squatting on the sand, having lunch, but doesn't do much to break up the rhythm. It's all cheerful and pleasant and filled with the wonder of it all but it doesn't have much going for it besides its intellectual verve and its unimpeachable acting. These sorts of ideas are squeezed out like toothpaste throughout the film, the gravity of the subjects never quite overcoming the ordinariness of their expression. I wish they'd have added a fourth character who was a Dadaist or an aging member of Andy Warhol's Factory or a stand-up comic. Maybe Little Richard.
I suspect the ultimate goal was not so much to teach the public that atoms are indeed very small, but that everything we do has moral overtones. Most of what we do in the way of scientific research, says Ullman, is paid for by the Pentagon, and we turn the responsibility for using our results back to the people who paid us. And of course the scientists and the Pentagon -- and poets and politicians, as well -- are us. Florence Kluckhohn outlined three ways of adapting to nature: (1) subjugating ourselves to it, (2) living in harmony with it, or (3) conquering it. Ullman plumps for living in harmony with it, of course, but although it sounds suspiciously platitudinous we WILL get politicians standing on earth scorched by forest fires or cities swept away by floods and declaring nature an "enemy." Here's a quote from another egghead -- Pogo the Possum: "We have met the enemy and he is us."