A philosophy professor is coralled into an erratic reckoning with a terrible act in his past in a sincere and oddly absorbing attempt to turn an off-puttingly controversial issue into a guilt-and-morality play. Another man, another room, another vile past deed in need of expiation. On the one hand you could accuse writer-director Paul Schrader of retreading old ground with his latest unadorned exploration of guilt, transgression and the intellectual work that a sinner must do in order to seek redemption for his sins.
On the other hand, you cannot ever accuse Paul Schrader of taking the easy way out when there is available to him a difficult way to get deeper in. If Schrader here is embracing familiar themes, there is nothing comfortable about this embrace, given that those themes, present in the majority of his recent output, can be reduced to the same question, reformulated each time to a different, and differently heinous, model. In “The Card Counter,” he wondered if it is possible to once have been, but no longer be, a torturer.
In “Master Gardener,” he pondered whether one could once have been, but no longer be, a Nazi. And with this new film, his endless preoccupations approach once again a kind of moral event-horizon of awfulness: Is it possible to once have been a pedophile? The opening of “The Basics of Philosophy” puts Jack Huston‘s Prof.
John Jorrisen in front of a blackboard on which is written “The Basics of Philosophy,” as he talks to his students about his course, “The Basics of Philosophy,” while trying to elicit from them their own impressions of, well, the basics of philosophy. This bluntly presentational approach is either damningly clumsy, or daringly straightforward, depending on which side of the Schrader Dividing Line you fall. And wherever you have landed in the past, this film — what was it called again? — is unlikely to be the one that will shift you from one column to the other.
But for those who find (and in some cases may be slightly mystified as to why) that there is a nagging, needling value to Schrader’s ongoing project of tussling with grandiose dilemmas of transgression and deliverance, there is some new news here. For one thing, Schrader’s collaboration with ace DP Sean Price Williams lends bit more visual interest to the ascetic, bordering on bland, aesthetic he has established before. And for another, the seriousness of Schrader’s intentions, however uneven the outcome, are flattered by the somber mood established by Eli Kezsler’s restless, haunted score.
Still, an air of artificiality and sometimes theatricality does pervade his talky, often didactic scenes, which actually plays to the benefit of the performances — especially from Huston. He is impressive here because of the peculiar intensity of his gaze, the too-smoothly-controlled, cultured timbre of his voice, the general sense of something about him being just that bit off. John teaches at a small, leafy college by day, while by night working on a book about rationalist philosopher Spinoza and dating his beautiful colleague Becca (Sofia Boutella), a professor of psychology who has a son with whom John gets along well.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
