Romulus my father (2007)

Watching Romulus my father was weird. The reason: Raimond Gaita. For me, Gaita is the philosopher who wrote Good and evil and A common humanity and The philosopher's dog. I haven't really reconciled myself with the idea of Gaita as a character in a movie. I am not sure why. I am not upset by the idea of Tony Blair or Keith Richards or any other famous person, politician or celebrity having their lives disentangled and (de-)constructed on the screen. It's something about philosophers on film that I find really unnerving. Maybe that reveals something unnerving about my relation to philosophers and philosophy. Philosophers are Minds and they have always been so, even as five-year-olds they are the Great Mind to come. Dammit, that's hell of a bad image of what philosophers are. I remember watching Iris, and that was similarly weird. To me, Iris Murdoch is not the woman who was sick with Alzheimer. She wrote the great Sovereignty of Good, and no matter how much I explain to myself that philosophers, too, are mortal beings with ordinary lives, there's something I can't really put my finger on here that I find a little spooky. The cure to all this would be big-production films about philosophers. Kant: the movie (Kant pacing the streets of Königsberg / Kant throwing a party / Kant doing whatever he used to do with Lampe-the-servant / weepy ending scene, transforming the purity of reason&morals into glossy images).

But this is way off topic. Romulus my father is a sensitive movie about Raimond the child, his father, Romulus, an immigrant from Yogoslavia and his afflicted mother, Christina. I haven't read Gaita's memoir on which the film is based (my friends have praised it so much that I've become a little afraid of my expectations being let down). But having read Gaita's philosophy, I know his perception of misfortune and affliction is humane without being the kind of wishy-washy "humanism" that does not really take anything seriously.

The rural setting of the film is brought to life magnificently; the grim beauty of nature, his father's friends, quiet moments on the porch or with the animals in the house. However, throughout the film I cannot help feeling that Roxburgh's take on the relationship between father and son, and especially between son and mother, could have been explored with more poignancy and more originality than what Roxburgh's movie contrives. It's not that the movie is sentimental or that it is shoddy. The problem, for me, is that I remain distant to the story. Somehow, it fails to engage me in a deep way. Even though the viewer gets hints of the characters' problems with themselves and with others, some scenes bring out heightened drama rather than exploring the complexity of the situations at hand. I felt that this was especially a problem in how Raimond's relation to his mother was dealt with. As it is now, she remains a character with erratic behavior. I'm just confused by this part of the story (what I crave is not some simple "psychological explanation" but what was missing were rather more - to use one of Gaita's own favorite expressions - lucid descriptions.).

I will have to read the book and find out for myself whether the film's perspective differs from the book's. Somehow I suspect that it does, but that is an unfounded suspicion of course.