The Neon Bible [1995] Terence Davies torrent

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The Neon Bible (1995)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113952/

The Neon Bible is a 1995 drama film written and directed by Terence Davies, based on the novel of the same name by John Kennedy Toole. The film is about a boy named David (Jacob Tierney) coming of age in Georgia in the 1940s. His abusive father (Denis Leary) enlists in the army during World War II and disappears and David is left to take care of his mother (Diana Scarwid) with his Aunt Mae (Gena Rowlands) who is a singer. It was filmed in the state of Georgia, in the cities Atlanta, Crawfordville, and Madison.

The film was released in France in August 1995, the United Kingdom in October 1995, Australia in November 1995, and released in the United States on March 1, 1996. It was a selection of the 1995 New York Film Festival.

Terrance Davies\' first film to take place in America, The Neon Bible is an occasionally powerful misfire is the coming of age tale of a young Southern boy named David. The film features Gena Rowlands as the film\'s protagonist\'s Aunt Mae. A feisty, sexual, sometimes lounge singer, she\'s a woman that\'s done a lot of living, and her introduction to David\'s world is an absolute eye opener. She represents the world outside his limited sphere. Once David meets her, he has no chance of being happy with the life that he has. When WWII takes his father out of the picture, his small family slides into a breakdown. There\'s a real sense of deterioration that taints the whole film in a unique way.

Davies manages some interesting directorial feats here. More than almost any director, he knows how to convey a feeling of nostalgia. The entire film is a flashback, and the film\'s pacing and general mood never really allow us to forget that. Some scenes, such as a hypocritical yet impassioned church rally are portrayed with a crystallizing acuteness of detail (even when that detail is grotesquely inflated). Others, like the film\'s funeral scene, are reduced to a few impressionistic images. This reflective quality is the film\'s greatest hindrance, however. The film never really manages to shake out of the dull funk that daydreaming creates. Still, what it lacks in dramatic thrust is made up for in the momentary (and sometimes sustained) glimpses of brilliance.

Terence Davies’ The Neon Bible (1995) opens with a patently surreal, metallic-blue image of a steam engine coughing to a start. The landscape we see is uncannily alien not only because it is shrouded in steam, but also because it is Davies’ first film in a foreign country. Davies, possibly inspired by the horizontality of south side America, shoots in widescreen for the first time (and how!), departing from the cozy aspect ratios of his British films, with a healthy contempt for the shot-reverse shot grammar, squarely centre-framing his characters and providing a palpable sense of isolation marking them. Adapted from John Kennedy Toole’s debut novel (written when the author was just 16), The Neon Bible is ostensibly a transition work for Davies. One could have, in fact, seen this sort of a picture coming right after his previous film, given how it had exhaustively mined the British filmmaker’s interests, providing a magnificent summation of his career thus far. Consequently, The Neon Bible straddles not only the experimental, elliptical structures of all his earlier works and the more straightforward narrative of The House of Mirth (2000), but also the honest, affecting, personal expression that had so far been the hallmark of Davies’ work and genre conventions and tropes that seem to have tagged along with this American outing of his. Davies attempts to impart a personal dimension to the text by punctuating it with sequences involving church, cinema and classroom – the three most characteristic spaces in Davies’ cinema – and the indistinct borders between each of them. But then, he also designates a rank cliché borrowed from independent cinema as one of the two important characters of the film: the aging, washed-up artist played by Gena Rowlands (who reprises and recycles her work with Cassavetes). However, the scenes involving the lead David (Jacob Tierney) are much more authentic and moving, especially the Sokurov-like episodes with his mother.