Subject: REVIEW: POWDER

From: [email-masked] (Gerard Martin)
Date: Tue, 7 Nov 1995 01:46:42 GMT

POWDER
                       A film review by Gerard Martin
                        Copyright 1995 Gerard Martin

Directed by : Victor Salva
Written by : Victor Salva
Starring : Sean Patrick Flanery, Lance Henriksen, 
           Mary Steenburgen, Jeff Goldblum

     Wreathed in tragedy, POWDER begins with a first vestige of human
existence; a new life is abruptly born into our world while another,
his mother, departs.

     The new-born child is alone for the first time in his short life.
Just how alone, it seems, he will also remember for the rest of his
life.

     Nicknamed Powder for his powder-white albino skin, this newborn is
aware of everything and everyone around him.  The wired devices
measuring his brain activity completely blacken the extreme limits of
the measurement scale.

     Years later, the young man Powder, played by Sean Patrick Flanery,
remembers every detail of his life--the loss of his mother;
abandonment as a baby by his father; and the many works of literature
that he absorbed while down in the comfortably dark cellar of his
grandparent's farmhouse.  He was surrounded by shelves of books that he
will remember word for word for the rest of his life.  Interspersed
against walls are diverse toylike devices of his own construction.

     The story really begins the day that both of his grandparents are
dead; his grandfather being the last of the two to pass away.  Still a
minor, he becomes ward of the state and, for the first time in his
life, he is joined with the ranks of humanity; his grandparents having
served as living buffers during the entirety of his early life.  For
reasons of fear or ignorance, they had even stopped touching him.  It
seems that Powder holds a frighteningly unique relationship with the
adverse forces of the heavens.

     A series of far-reaching metaphors express profound notions about
life.  At the orphanage that doubles as a boy's reform school, Powder
arrests the attention of the more unfriendly of their number by
dramatically magnetizing the mealroom's entire collection of spoons
save one.  Held together into one giant clump of silverware and food,
the one spoon remaining flits across the table to join the clump only
to realize it crash apart into individual pieces again.  Not too much
longer into the story, the presence of a science lab arc lamp reveals
Powder's unearthly relationship with the electrical forces.

     Other special abilities are revealed.  Powder is close enough to
humanity to feel another's feelings--to actually listen to people from
the inside.  In an episode involving a hunter, he is even able to
transfer the fear and sickness of an animal's near death to
life-numbing effect.  A sports-hunter's life, needless to say, is
changed forever.

     Time and time again, the bits and pieces of life are challenged.
The firmest pillars of society are undermined one by one.  A sheriff
and his deputy must yield everything they believes to a higher plane of
existence.  Otherwise Powder might really be a threat to all that is
unifying about life--all things normally unanswered or unasked.

     Where does our soul go after death?  To what extent might we not
even exist except as small parts of everything else?  Are we substantial
enough to allow life to be cordially reduced to electrical impulses
only to be reconstructed into re-animated vitalizing forces of
existence?

     There is always much happening just under the surface of POWDER.
What is the pure essence of life?  High school science teacher Donald
Ripley, played smartly by Jeff Goldblum, would have life reduced to the
smallest possible elements--molecules governed by carefully controlled
and ordered impulses of electricity.  As some of these basic
assumptions are challenged, levels upon levels of meaning are revealed
in Ripley's gleaning insights, relentless further questioning and his
relooking closely at the elements that comprise the basis of life and
living.

     POWDER is a beautiful film to watch as the narrative unfolds with
every change of scenery.  There are incredible compositions that
involving pure light, meaningful colour and revealing shadow.  There is
the whiteness of powder against the drab contours of broken inner
lives.  The surface layer of order and understanding is shattered
against what lies just below, under the surface and perhaps,
ultimately, holding all of the pieces together in a discerning order of
arrangement.

     In a discourse that is very much alive in this closing of the
millennium, humanity is pitted against technology as the one is divided
from the other.

--
[email-masked]