This movie is a hard one to review, understand and even try and understand why anyone liked it, as the reviews are mostly positive, which makes no sense to me. This is another example of a low budget movie trying to be different and in the process of trying to be different, creates differences from what we are used to in terms of story or plot that are overtaken by confusion and annoying tricks and references that do nothing more than annoy and confuse the audience. This movie is about a young woman played by Kristen Stewart who has a twin brother who has the same heart abnormality that she has and he died of a heart attack at only age 27. What follows is grief caused by her brother’s death, fear of her own possible early death from the same heart problem her brother had, a murder that came out of nowhere, appearances of a ghost that we are lead to believe could be her brother, but we are never completely sure of this.

This movie has references that include ghosts, mediums, murder, an overly complex plot, nudity in several scenes that involve Kristen Stewart and an ending that you would probably need to have explained by both the screenwriter and the director. What was the point of all this? I will leave the point of this movie to whoever sees this strange and weird film to decide for themselves. I have never been a fan of movies like this because I have always been a believer of “less is more” and that when you try so hard to create scenes too fancy or complicated instead of just engaging an audience, all you have is one long annoying movie. For these main reasons, I do not recommend this very strange film.

Before the release of Jaws in the summer of 1975 there really wasn’t something like a summer blockbuster type of movie. Jaws, is based on the Peter Benchley book, was the first movie of its kind and the very first summer blockbuster. Horror movies and scary movies we had, but nothing like this. Nothing where a Giant Great White shark terrorized and killed several residents of an east coast beach town. And nothing like the opening scene of this movie where a woman is killed by a shark at night while swimming in the ocean. Accompanying all of this was the music of John Williams which was brilliant and never more effective than the now famous music when the shark would start to attack someone. It is hard to imagine more perfect theme music for Jaws than the musical score for this great film.

Over the years we all have learned through documentaries and stories we have read about the extreme difficulty everyone who worked on this film, on Martha’s Vinyard with the mechanical shark that they named “Bruce”. To get past many of the non-stop mechanical shark problems, the director of Jaws, Steven Spielberg eventually realized that showing less of the shark would be more terrifying than showing more and this, in fact, made the film even more scary than it would have been otherwise. In the end, despite so many production problems and the film constantly being overbudget, Jaws became the greatest box office movie hit up to that time.

All of the main stars in this movie were all at the peak of their acting skills, Richard Dreyfus, Robert Shaw and Roy Scheider and all of them probably thought at the time that the movie would be a bomb, mainly due to all the problems with the mechanical shark. Perhaps the greatest scene in the movie was the exact moment in time where the Great White shark showed his face for the first time, as Scheider was pouring blood into the water to lure him to be captured and killed. His slow backward walk towards the middle of the boat and his now famous line to Quint, played by Robert Shaw, “We are going to need a bigger boat”, is the one line in the entire history of all movies that has been repeated more times than any other.  I cannot even begin to count how many times I have heard someone say, “We are going to need a bigger something” in a movie. Another standout performance for me was Murray Hamilton’s portrayal of the town mayor, who throughout the entire movie, cared more about the money the township would be losing, rather than saving lives. His acting and bad decisions during so many arguments with Richard Dreyfus and Roy Scheider provide some of the most frustrating and funny moments in the movie. Hamilton’s character is a politician and a personality that all of us have had experiences running into and disliking.

The ending of Jaws including several scenes of Hollywood overkill and showing some things that a shark would never do, including launching its entire body into the sinking boat, but the big explosive ending created the satisfying blockbuster ending we were all waiting for. The concept of a summer blockbuster had to start somewhere and Jaws started it all 42 years ago.

From Dictionary.com:

The Definition of Catharsis:

1. The purging of the emotions or relieving of emotional tensions, especially through certain kinds of art, as tragedy or music.
2. Psychiatry: Psychotherapy that encourages or permits the discharge of pent-up, socially unacceptable effects. Discharge of pent-up emotions so as to result in the alleviation of symptoms or the permanent relief of the condition.

The definition of the word Catharsis is a very good summarization of what the movie Wilson is all about. Once you realize very early on that this film is about a man named Wilson, played by Woody Harrelson, whose entire life has been a disaster, you start to wonder if a story about a person like this could ever be funny. Perhaps this could be possible, but Wilson fails to be funny often enough to conclude that it is not really a comedy movie or a very good movie either. Perhaps if Wilson was made more of a likable person, this movie would have been more entertaining and engaging or even funny, but far too often Wilson just bothers people, many of them total strangers and engages in rude conversations with everybody he encounters to perhaps temporarily make himself feel less alone. Ultimately the result of all this rude behavior is the audience has to endure an annoying and obnoxious person for the full 90 minutes this movie runs. I was surprised that during this entire story there was not one mention of what Wilson does for money or what he does for a living or even how he became such a disaster of a person in the first place. Considering our jobs are such a large percentage of our existence it would have been nice to see how or if Wilson is employed.

The story of Wilson is really no story at all, but rather a series of strange events and discoveries, including running into his x-wife and from there events go from strange, to weird, to pathetic, to very depressing and then back to pathetic again. There are several cameo appearances in this film, including Mary Lynn Rajskub, Cheryl Hines and Laura Dern, who plays Wilson’s x-wife who has of all things the name “Pippi”, and her life and reality since her divorce from Wilson many years earlier is almost as pathetic has his is.

The attempts to be a different type of a story are many in this film, but being different than most stories we have all seen before is not enough to make Wilson a good or even an average movie. It is hard to imagine how this movie was even made considering the uninteresting depressing story that tries to make a sad and pathetic life funny. On top of all this just about all the characters in this file are very unlikable and in the end, there is no attempt by Wilson or even his x-wife to somehow transition into a better person. For these reasons and so many others, I cannot recommend Wilson.