Self help author John Tarnoff says, “In order to create your future, you have to reconcile your past.” It’s good advice for his boomer audience, the over 50s who may be looking to reconnect and restart their lives. It’s also a theme that runs through “Into Invisible Light,” a new film starring Jenifer Dale.
Dale, who co-wrote the script with director Shelagh Carter, plays Helena Grayson a recently widowed woman who can only claim the inheritance if she heads a foundation for young artists. Sitting in the big chair, she has to figure out who gets support and who doesn’t. She’s thrust into the world of artists despite having given up her artistic objectives years ago. This leads to her to explore her own ambition, to write again. Writing allows her to find her voice again, to examine a life that felt inconsequential and repressed without an artistic outlet. Helping her spark joy is Michael (Peter Keleghan), a Samuel-Beckett-quoting former flame, now a writing professor. Examining her past, just as Tarnoff suggests, leads the way to her future.
“Into Invisible Light” is a movie for adults; a film for people who have lived a life and are in process, looking to start over again. It’s a finely tuned story of second chances that eloquently essays a reawakening.
Densely written, this thoughtful examination of Helena’s new phase of life is supported by elegant cinematography courtesy of Ousama Rawi and a moody, stark score by Shawn Pierce. It occasionally takes itself a bit too seriously, leaning on minor chord drama for effect, but the lingering effect is one of hopeful rebirth.
“Unless,” a new film staring Catherine Keener, is a portrait of a family in distress.
Successful author—a “book club darling”—and translator Reta Winters (Keener), her physician partner Tom (Matt Craven) and children are rocked out of their suburban complacency when daughter Norah (Hannah Gross) drops out of society to become a panhandler on the streets of Toronto.
Wrapped in a thick wool blanket, holding a sign that reads “Goodness,” Norah sits, catatonically outside of legendary discount department store Honest Ed’s. Detached and despondent, the young woman sits, quiet as the falling snow that swirls around her as her family struggles to understand why and how she ended up on the street. Is it a breakdown? A protest? A personal revolution? A reckoning of some sort?
Based on Pulitzer Prize winner Carol Shields’s final novel, she passed away in 2003, “Unless” isn’t driven by plot but by Norah’s unhappiness and her family’s reaction to it. Some flowery dialogue occasionally gets in the way—“Sometimes I think that for Norah there’s a bounteous feast going on but she has not been invited.”—but Keener’s keen intelligence and concern provides the emotional core that shapes the thin story into a compelling character study. In the novel Reta’s journey was an internal one and Keener makes it external and as cinematic as possible given the subdued nature of the film.
Although the question of why and how this happened lies at the heart of the film, director Alan Gilsenan is more interested in the effects of Norah’s decision than the decision itself. There is a conclusion, a reason, but the destination in this case is less satisfying than the journey. The trauma that triggered Norah’s inward turn is unsettling, both emotionally and visually as presented in the movie, but doesn’t provide the kind of capper a story like this needs to transcend character. It feels slightly out of balance in its final minutes as it switches focus from Reta to Norah because we realize that this isn’t the story of a woman’s decision to drop out, but the story of a family’s reckoning with the aftermath of that choice.
