Monday this week, when I flew back to Chicago from Los Angeles where I’d been overseeing the…
If you had told me a decade ago, I would watch a movie on my phone … and enjoy it … I would have shooed you away.
Monday this week, when I flew back to Chicago from Los Angeles where I’d been overseeing the opening weekend session of the 6th annual Black List / Women In Film feature writers lab, I did something for the first time. I watched a movie on my cellphone. That movie was Living. Not only did I watch it, I read the script at the same time.
If you had told me a decade ago, I would watch a movie on my phone … and enjoy it … I would have shooed you away.
Cut to ten years later and at points in the movie, I’m sitting in my airplane seat, cheeks wet with tears and blowing my nose every few minutes.
I’m sure people thought I had COVID or some other infectious disease.
I assured my seatmate.
“It’s a movie. A sad, but beautiful movie.”
And that it is.
Living is very much in the spirit of one of my favorite screenwriting mantras: Simple plot. Complex characters.
It aligns quite neatly with a psychological version of the hero’s journey: The Protagonist enters an extraordinary world – in this case, one in which he learns he’s dying – responds to that revelation by seeking to reconnect with a spirit of living. There is an Attractor character who facilitates his embrace of an inner state of emotional being he had tamped down over the years and the experiences he has in Act Two fuel his transformation process. In the end, he is a changed individual … and then dies.
So simple, right? Yet, the way the story’s structure is constructed provides a few interesting plot twists which we will examine in Part 2 of this series.