Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 13-February-05
Spoiler Rating: Low

The Waterdance (1992)

Conventional wisdom has it that when something terrible happens you experience a shift in focus wherein the things that "really matter" become the things that really matter. You might have undervalued family, friends, love, and honor in the past, but now they seem like the most important goals and most treasured accomplishments of your life. "The Waterdance," an unfairly overlooked film from the '90s, takes this theory and ups it to the next level, showing how tragedy also brings problems into clearer focus so that their solutions are nearer to hand — if you're strong enough to weather them. In a subtly wonderful way, the movie delivers a message of perseverance that addresses life's turning points but applies to the everyday fight as well.

The setting for "The Waterdance" is a halfway house for men getting ready to return to "normal" life after being released from the hospital in a wheelchair. Entry into this world is provided by Joel (Eric Stoltz), a scholarly young writer who arrives to convalesce after a hiking accident. His wardmates include a self-proclaimed ladies man (Wesley Snipes) and a redneck biker (William Forsythe), who pass the time butting heads. Indeed, everyone in the ward does a lot of griping and bickering (including the residents in charge), an understandable outcome when people who have nothing in common but misfortune are thrown together with no privacy and little opportunity for escape. Yet in the tradition of all movies that take place inside an institution, each man reveals a sympathetic humanity by struggling with a personal predicament in addition to the one they all share. This allows them to forge unlikely bonds, mature in unforeseen ways, and engage in cathartic acts in defiance of their situation.

The centerpiece of the movie is Joel's relationship with Anna (Helen Hunt), a married woman with whom he is deeply in love and seriously involved. Their romance (confusing before and now complicated by the accident) illustrates how a major upheaval can force a person to make tough decisions that need to be made; it also brings considerable heat to the movie's recurring theme of sexuality. In all honesty, I don't fully buy into their story: how she manages to take care of Joel, hold down a job, and hoodwink a husband at home is perplexing — as is whether I should hate her for doing so — but the actors are truly convincing in their affection and pain. Like most people whether they have suffered calamity or not, Joel and Anna want things that they don't seem able or destined to have, and at some point they need to face it. In the end, their affair must be taken in the same way as the other characters and relationships in "The Waterdance:" as symbolic of the fact that life can suck in a million and one ways, and that the courageous thing to do is to keep on trying.

Copyright © 2005 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.