Elsewhere (2019): Honoring Lives Lost by Living Your Own
Elsewhere (2019): Honoring Lives Lost by Living Your Own
“Moss challenges the whole idea that competition is the best way to survive.”
Elsewhere (2019) — currently streaming on Prime Video — is about a widower hanging onto the past who learns to move forward after meeting a hopeful woman who’s also experienced loss.
I immediately liked this movie because of the opening scene with the widower standing on a cliffside about to pour his wife’s ashes from an urn. Flushed with panic, he replaces the urn’s top and hugs it tightly beneath his chin. It’s still too early to let go. Without words, this made me feel how desperately he missed his wife. Is there another movie where a wordless “show versus tell” scene appears so early on and so powerfully?
Throughout the movie, Aden Young who plays the widower named Bruno powerfully exercises this “show versus tell” mode of storytelling. When his eyes are downcast, lost in a void, hopelessly trying to remember his late wife, we can feel that he is truly elsewhere. Barely alive. Neither here nor there. Until Marie comes along. On one hand, she has entered a situation that robs Bruno of the waterside cottage he built with his late wife. On the other, she is living proof that one can create a new, beautiful life after experiencing loss.
“Why do you love this house?” Bruno asks her.
“I like how it makes me feel. How it creaks every day before sundown, like it’s stretching. I like how different the kitchen looks in the morning than it did the night before. I like the sounds of the ocean at night in my bed. Sometimes I wake up just before sunrise and I lay there listening. Then I get up and open all the windows. I make coffee. And I look outside. And I swear at that moment there’s nothing in the world I would rather have. It’s taken me a long time for me to say that about anything.”
In the best way possible, the tone of this scene (0:55:10) resembles the scene in Sideways (2004) when Maya reflects about why she loves wine in the company of Miles. And it’s as equally as powerful in Elsewhere (2019) because of the actress Parker Posey. The depth of her character’s hopeful spirit is as powerful as Bruno’s despair. She even finds a way in another scene to extract hope from moss, the topic of a book she’s working on.
“I’ve actually never thought about moss,” Bruno says.
“Well, big mistake. They’ve been here a really long time. Longer than any other land plant. And they’ve figured out a lot about how to be here on this earth. Instead of colonizing nature with grandeur and size like humans do, they’ve gracefully accepted they’re bad competitors. And I love it because by doing that they challenge the whole idea that competition is the best way to survive. And I just think that’s amazing. That such a humble, little plant can persist like that.”
While it’d be a stretch for the almighty moss to be a metaphor for Bruno, he’s definitely a little plant who his friend, mother, and father water with support throughout the movie. His friend (Ken Jeong) gives his vespa to a small-town lawyer in exchange for helping Bruno win back his house; his mother (Jacki Weaver) yells at Bruno’s once-father-in-law when he convicts Bruno of stealing a golden horse statue from his front yard; and his father (Beau Bridges) installs a TV dish on top the backyard tool shed when Bruno moves into it after getting evicted. “If he’s gonna live in the shed, he’ll have a TV in the shed.”
In one of my favorite scenes, his father helps him work through his depression over a couple of beers in the backyard by the shed. What’s touching about this scene is the sincere concern his father has about his wellbeing. Not only does he listen to Bruno and validate his feelings; he asks questions about what Bruno can do to honor his late wife’s life by living his own.
Heartfelt scenes like this, combined with the lost looks of Aden Young, monologues from Parker Posey, and delightful performances from Bridges and Weaver make this a movie worth watching, especially if you’re in a situation where you feel stuck.
If you enjoy this movie and the heart-to-heart scene with Aden Young and Beau Bridges, you can buy the comic featured in this post as a high quality 12x12 mini poster print.