Oh, for Pete’s sake. This film, to which I refer As The Earth Doubles, won a 2011 audience award at Sundance. Surely it was for style alone, and if that is the case, then maybe that is all that matters to audiences at Sundance anymore. In defense of this otherwise fairly ridiculous movie I concede it was pleasing to watch for its interesting cinematography and tone. However, you can find more pinholes in this movie’s story than in a pair of glasses needed to watch an eclipse.
A promising, beautiful, brilliant teenager, ecstatic over her acceptance to MIT, parties, then recklessly drives, passes out, and smashes headlong into a stopped vehicle, killing a woman and child. She serves a prison term. After her release, beleaguered by guilt, she takes a low-functioning job on a high school janitorial staff. One day, she finds the lone survivor of the accident she caused. She goes to his door to apologize, but cowers and offers a free trial of housekeeping instead. He accepts. During the course of all this one wonders if he knows who she is, but then he reveals he had never been able to find out her identity because she was a minor at the time of the crash. They engage in a love affair.Meanwhile, she wins a ticket to Earth 2, a heretofore unexplored double planet on which humans, if they can get there, might encounter themselves. Okay, I can accept the science fiction for what it is, and it's even a good premise for psychological drama, but by now the movie itself has devolved into melodrama. To review, this young woman has saved the middle-aged composer from his alcohol-infused desolation and grief by cleaning and organizing his house, and moreover, he is consequently reinvigorated to put violin bow to saw, yes, saw, to create a sort of other-worldly composition fitting of the movie’s theme, which he performs for her. Pursuant to his learning who she is and her startling revelation his wife and child might be alive on the double planet, she gives him her winning ticket to Earth 2. Oh, please.
