A poet (John Heard) and his best friend, a former and future
presidential candidate (Sam Waterston), meet a scientist (Liv Ullmann) at a
French castle by chance, and the rest of the film the three of them are
seen wandering through the castle and the landscape, discussing pretty
much everything from Descartes and Newton to clockworks and nuclear
physics - and at the end of the day, pretty much each of them has become a
better person. Mindwalk isn't a movie with much of a
plot, it's really just that, three people talking. Now this could be
fairly interesting if it was accompanied by a visionary, inventive,
avant-garde direction ... but unfortunately, Bernt Amadeus Capra's
directorial effort is unimaginative and flat as can be. Which is too bad,
because despite its intellectual content, the film is anything but
well-written, the characters are merely clichés (the disillusioned
eco-friendly scientist, the pragmatic politician and the unworldly poet)
who don't undergo any kind of development, their dialogues lack any kind of
spark, and the ending only tries to present a resolution without actually
succeeding. What saves the film from total disaster is its actors (even
though John Heard overdoes his role in the sort-of-finale, not at all
helped by lousy writing) - but that's hardly enough to make the film worth
seeing.
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