Poetry: What Did I Just Watch?

 

She thinks apples are for eating.

 

Poetry is probably the greatest smack in the face to my expectations I’ve ever encountered in a movie since I realized that almost the entirety of Robin Williams’ Patch Adams was a filthy lie. I expected a film about an innocent old woman just dealing with growing old in Korea when I walked into the auditorium last night. After an image of a dead girl’s boy in a river simple grandmother named Mija is raising her irresponsible and lazy grandson Wook, who obsesses with computers, television, and music, and is having some minor health problems; the dead girl was a bit off, but my expectations were pretty sound up to that point. Then, completely out of the blue, some guy we’ve never met before calls Mija up and takes her to a meeting with the fathers of Wook’s friends to tell her that Wook and their sons all raped that girl in the river for years before she committed suicide. They then nonchalantly discuss how horrible this incident will be for their sons’ careers and that they’re just going to throw some money at the poor girl’s family to keep them quiet.

Wow.

When I first saw Wook, I thought the film was becoming an anti-media message about how today’s youth was obsessed with technology. Instead, he’s losing all empathy after joining his friends in sexually abusing a girl at school. Talk about not judging a book (or in this case, a film) by its cover. I came to loathe the kid, not only through the fact that he and his friends raped that poor girl, but through his sheer lack of empathy for his actions and even his disregard for his sole caretaker. He is a monster, and we quickly come to hate him for it. Every scene with him completely blowing off his grandmother to watch TV or just sulk into his bedroom was painful to watch, especially since we know how much Mija is torn over her love for him and her desire to despise him.

Some people in Signs and Wonders said they never saw the end coming. The moment I realized that Mija was dealing with Alzheimer’s and her grandson’s horrific actions, I knew what the outcome was going to be, and when she collected Agnes’ picture from the church that verified it for me. That being said, while I understood the plot of the movie easily, I feel like I didn’t get all of its messages. I actually didn’t pay all that much attention to Agnes’ Song, which I should have, but I had seen the ending coming from so far away that I just zoned out over the final minute or so of the movie to admire the cinematography. I will definitely need to see this film again, if only to look for the meanings that were lost on me so I stop feeling like a horrible person for missing them.

In closing, I made the mistake of judging a film by its cover and I was too engrossed in just how well the film was shot and how well the actors pulled off their roles that I missed all the messages that went with it all. Even the poem, which was the focus of the whole movie.