9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Juxtaposition of Mayan mythology and modern medicine, March 24, 2006
This review is from: House of Cards (DVD)
This is not a movie about autism. Let it go.
**Spoilers!**
This is a movie about a little girl who grows up around Mayan tradition, and who is taken away from that back to the States when her father is killed. A lot of the story takes place in memories, visions and dreams, so it only makes "sense" in the context of the Mayan teachings the little girl grew up with. It doesn't translate well to the late 20th Century USA - that's the whole point of the movie. It works in spite of the fact that none of the adults around this little girl have a clue what is happening, even though it's spelled out on the tapes of Sally and the old Mayan man.
She isn't autistic - she's in a trance, on a vision quest. When she and her mother work out the grief, she comes out of it. That's a natural result of such a journey. The ending is beautiful and poetic. The problem is that if you aren't familiar with shamanic traditions, or you don't pay close attention to what the child is hearing and seeing, you won't know what's happening. No one sums it up, and the people around the little girl never pick up on the symbols involved in her healing - cards, The Tower, The Moon- nor do they understand the process they've just gone through.
The child knew enough to heal herself in spite of the adults around her, and her mother facilitates this by following her own intuition in reaching the girl. It's a powerful story - highly recommended.
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Movie about Hope and Motherhood!, August 18, 2000
By A Customer
This story is NOT about drugs or Autism. It's about a mother's journey to reach out to her daughter and the need to find healing after tragedy. It's a mystical and heart-warming story about a girl who withdraws into herself to reach out to her recently deceased father. Tommy Lee Jones is a court appointed child psychologist assigned to assess her mental condition. Yes, he works with Autistic children, but that's only part of his job. Kathleen Turner is the mother who can't deal with her husband's death, let alone her daughter's strange withdrawal. The child DOES NOT take any psychotropic drugs. She leads Turner and Jones through a mystical journey to find peace for her father's soul and heal the wounds of his loss for herself and her mother. A very spiritually uplifting tale.
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is not a movie about Autism, January 8, 2005
This is a about a child disturbed by the death of her father and who is told that she should not cry about it and also that her father is in the moon, a fantasy created in the mind of the child trying to thereafter trying to reach him there. One reviewer thought it was about autism, which it was not. It seems that autism has become a generalization for anything people don't understand. The mother of the child doesn't accept the conventional methods of psychology and uses her own intelligence to "decode" the puzzle of the child's disturbance and succeeds to help her to come out of her fantasy of her father being on the moon where he went after he died. It is a wonderful portrayal of a mother who won't give up and sets out to look at her daughter's disturbance in a new light, using what could be called modern shamanism to recreate the dilemma where the child can see the futility of her actually being able to get to the moon to see her father. This movie is a must see!
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