Talking Big

After Yang (2022) glides along on its influences. Speak, Memory. More than anything else Tree of Life. Farrell says he has no words to express the mysterious nature of tea. Then he delivers a Werner Herzog impersonation that expresses it mock perfectly. This happens just at the midpoint of the movie time-wise. Manohla Dargis called the film “thematically elusive,” but like the no words for tea, that’s not quite right. It’s a struggle to tell a story of grief maybe. To that extent, it might be elusive. There’s no something without nothing. All depends on how we’ve been programmed.