Our Town (1940)
Directed by Sam Wood
Change comes slowly to a small New Hampshire town in the early 20th century. We see birth, life and death in this small community.
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What critics compared Our Town to
But the film doesn't so much call the playwright's beloved Our Town to mind as it does his screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's SHADOW OF A DOUBT, particularly the moment when murderous Uncle Charlie explains to his wide-eyed niece that if you ripped the fronts from most American houses, you'd find swine.
Many will see this intricately staged drama as a cryptic reworking of Thornton Wilder's Our Town with its focus on the smallest details of daily life among people who are working out their destinies by the choices they make.
The effect of this contained environment is theatrical and calls to mind Thornton Wilder's Our Town -- most of the staging happens in the audience's minds.
In the end, Von Trier's movie feels like a rebuke not just to the myth of American fraternity - the dark flipside of Thornton Wilder's Our Town - but to the very notion of common humanity.
One could be forgiven for momentarily mistaking Dogville for that fourth wall-breaking production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town that aired on HBO last year; as Dogville's narrator, John Hurt is as thorough and intrusive a commentator as Our Town's Stage Manager.
This is realised on screen in a strikingly original cinematic style that draws on Thornton Wilder's Our Town with its knowing narrator (Hurt) and a set made of almost nothing!
It rips off Spielberg’s A.I ., and Marvel fans probably won’t recognize that it also rips off Thornton Wilder’s Our Town — that’s part of the MCU cultural cheat.
Thus, his latest comedy, “About Time,” which he wrote and directed, is a disappointment, not only because it keeps reminding you in spots of other films and plays that toyed with similar ideas — oh, let’s say “Groundhog Day” and “Back to the Future” or even the Thornton Wilder classic play “Our Town” — but also because the movie doesn’t measure up to Curtis’ own high standards.
It’s in these intersections of the domestic and the cosmic that “The Tree of Life” thrums with the kind of profound simplicity Thornton Wilder captured in “Our Town.”
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The engine behind it is the mournful tone which channels Thornton Wilder's Our Town for its expression of the fragility of life and the temporary nature of all things.
(A British film critic at the time of its release likened it to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which could explain it: I frickin’ hate Our Town.)
Late in the film, Via is part of a production of “Our Town,” and there is in Chbosky’s film a touch of Thornton Wilder and a feel for the honest everyday rhythms of life.