The New Age

Critics seem to have split widely on this film, and it's easy to see why. It's a rather painful, plodding thing to sit through--yet one can't get it out of the mind afterward. Writer/director Tolkin has a lot of disturbing things to say about post-industrial affluence in America in the 1990s, and in trying to say everything in one movie he has piled it on so thick that the brain requires a postmortem to reflect. Judy Davis, as she was in "Husbands and Wives," is dynamite, and the film is worth seeing just for her. The film has an uncanny eye and feel for the bleak interiors of the contemporary American service economy: the boutiques, the high-rise telemarketing boiler rooms, the house-poor interiors of career people who are hardly ever at home, etc. The film's title refers to the spiritual quest of the couple to find a meaning to their existence, or at least some alternative approach to life to their destructive materialism. How they go about it is all wrong, of course. In true hedonist fashion, they try everything. At the same time they seek a simpler, spiritual, non-materialistic life via a bunch of wacky gurus and cultists, they are indulging in carnal and other pleasures as diversions. When they open a small business, ostensibly to gain more control over their lives and income, the forces of the world are worse than any bosses. In all of this, they seem to be outside of everything they do, as in dreams when you watch yourself and are powerless to control the changing scenery. Despite their doldrums and hostility, this is a couple who have too much in common to split. During the course of all this, Tolkin gets plenty of jabs in about an American economy that seems to be teetering on wisps of hope rather than on any true productivity. By the end, the "new age" looks uncomfortably like a very old one, in which the law of the jungle reigned.

The previous reviewer's comments mysteriously do not allude to the terrific humor of this film. It is a clever, understated, totally deadpan comedy. If you like black, dry humor, this film is for you. At the same time it skewers the vapidly self-affirming culture of the wealthy, new age set. Slowly, Peter Weller and Judy Davis's characters' natures are purified in the furnace of self-destruction, until they discover their true selves -- mediocrity and greed, which lately pretended to be new age spirituality. A succession of fatuous gurus pushes them down the slope of destruction, until finally Samuel Jackson, in a fabulous cameo, teaches Peter Weller how to attain ultimate truth through techniques of visualization. By this point, the Davis-Weller characters have lost their jobs, their wealth, their "friends", their home, their failed business, and their relationship (did I mention the affairs?), and, perhaps, all illusions that there was anything at their core.

With the exception of one or two scenes, everything in this film is deliciously subtle and understated, but all the more wickedly funny for it. You might not realize how good it is at first. A second viewing will really help your appreciation of it.

If this film doesn't make you laugh, grasshopper, then perhaps you still do not know yourself.

I liked this film because it does a good job of making the viewer consider what is important in life, and why. On the other hand, it is not the most exciting movie ever made. I recommend this if you want a story to ponder that exposes modern values to criticism. I give it a 7/10.

Peter and Katherine are a typical couple of California yuppies. They want to be cool, the want to indulge themselves, they live lavishly on their credit cards, and they hold "spiritual values" above wealth and work. Unfortunately, when their careers go down the toilet during the recession in the early 1990s, they fall upon hard times. They try to start an independent business, but their easy and hedonistic lifestyle prevents them from putting in the blood, sweat, and tears that are required for success in retail. Their spiritual values are of no help when things get rough, because their "New Age" values are really just a justification for selfishness and egocentricity.

The movie is the story of their loss of innocence. To get their lives back on track, they have to work hard at jobs that simply are not cool. Their elitist attitudes must give way to sacrifice and common sense. It is not clear whether this is a triumph or a tragedy for Peter and Katherine. That is left up to the viewer in this one.

"The New Age" is half fascinating and half dull. It's very much a comedy, albeit a very dark and satirical one. But it's emotionally distant, and has the distinct sense of being a film about rich people made for and by other rich people. It's about a world with a built-in sense of the ridiculous in the everyday, so much so that it's hard to know what's meant to make us laugh and what's designed to reflect real life. The leads are good. Peter Weller and Judy Davis disappear into their characters, Davis to the point I really didn't recognize her. The best and most entertaining part of the film is Samuel L. Jackson's cameo, and the scenes directly relating to it.

Michael Tolkin's script has a lot of depth, but his direction doesn't. He films what happens, but without any real understanding of how to stage it. "The New Age" is a visually flat film, and looks like just about every average film from 1994. Which is to say, pretty dull. But, in the end, the script lifts the film up enough to be interesting in passing. I don't regret having seen this.

This film was a complete surprise to me. It's clever, funny and very thought-provoking. Judy Davis and Peter Weller (that man is underrated) both deliver excellent performances. A warning: The ending isn't quite the usual happy salvation, but it really does hit the perfect note on one of the main themes of the film: You can't always get what you want. And pushing that very feeling to the viewer just before the credits is perhaps the cleverest thing about the whole film.