The finality, the simplicity of life, you think about it as a kid, but the American cinema doesn’t usually just hand it to you. But there it was. That’s when I knew Gus Van Sant was someone to whom I should pay very careful attention. It never mattered to me that he danced so close to the mainstream, the man had the truth on his side and I’d wait patiently to experience it. He’d deliver every few years and I’d be that kid again, wrecked, crying, seeing the simplicity of life and death and putting that work in context in my own life.
After 2019, with its myriad funerals for me, and 2020, in which everyone in America lost somebody, I returned to “Restless” and was once more reduced to my youngest self, learning about the end of life for the first time. I’m so grateful this man and his work exists. I don’t know what I would have done without it.
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