Echoes of Enlightenment

by Matt Hudson
Posted September 23, 2003

Rating: 9 out of 10 stars
Many, many, many moons ago, I rented a lot of movies on laser disc, and I am talking about the old-school version that you slipped in like an 8-track tape and then had to flip over halfway through the movie. I rented oddities and the occasional “normal” film. So one night, after more than a drop or two of beer down my throat, I popped in The Man Who Fell to Earth.
It took me at least two weeks before that movie stopped haunting my every waking thought. In that two weeks, I got the film sorted out in my head. Not that I felt like I really understood everything I saw, but my mind had finally worked it out enough to parcel the bits into workable chunks. Then I had to figure out what the film meant and how it fit into my world view.
Now I’m not saying that The Man Who Fell to Earth is such an earth-shattering piece of art that the complexity of the work needs to be plotted out by Stephen Hawking. I've seen it since then, and still find it unique and meaningful. But when I first saw it, I had never been faced with anything on that level. The film made me have to work to understand it and its images and its message.
The Last Wave and Don't Look Now did the same thing to me. These films still come back to me in the most unusual of times and rattle my brain.
Echoes of Enlightenment does the same thing, although to a much lesser degree, and I cannot tell you how much that delights me.
This is a time in which most filmmakers do not want to force their viewers to question their lives, their values, or their acceptance of reality. Entertainment is the focus, and I'm all for that, at least most of the time. But a steady diet of fun, thrilling, gory, dorky films eventually leaves a stale taste in your cinematic mouth. Echoes of Enlightenment provides an excellent change of diet.
Daniel is a lawyer. He works very hard. His wife is distant. Daniel works harder. His wife grows more distant. Clients are harder to satisfy. The cases become more difficult. Daniel works even harder. His wife is all but a stranger. Then, one day, Daniel vanishes. He leaves a trail of people whose lives he has touched and altered, but once he hit the coastline, he seems to have vanished into thin air.
The premise almost sounds like an episode of The X Files. But writer/director Dan Coplan doesn't go for the creepy mystery thing. Instead, he heaps so much crap onto the main character that the character's only option is shift gears and simplify his world in an effort to find meaning. His journey of spiritual enlightenment alters everyone with whom he comes in contact, and as he learns more about himself and his place in the world, everyone he meets suddenly finds they have the same desire to delve deeper into themselves and their existence.
Such a film could easily be a rambling mess or the breeding ground for cheap moralizing. Coplan keeps things well balanced between New Age prophet tale and raving looney road picture. For every scene you get of the main character opening his mind, you also get the vague feeling that he has just snapped from the stress of his professional and personal lives. The fact that you are made to closely identify with the main character in the first third of the film lends his spiritual road trip with just enough credibility to keep you by his side until he reaches the coastline and debates his ultimate fate.
Yet, as pleasant as the various threads of the story doing a Maypole dance happens to be, the film is not without a couple of minor weak points. Occasionally, the acting comes across as stiff and staged, and the weird thing is that those particular scenes come across as though they were improvised -- just not improvised with much confidence. Also, a couple of the scenes of characters debating drag on a bit long, as if the running time needed padding or the dialogue needed some minor tightening. Very slight problems in the great scheme of things.
If you can't watch Echoes of Enlightenment for the spiritual quest or the human search for meaning, watch it simply because it delivers a profoundly different experience than the run-of-the-mill film. Most likely, you will thank yourself, and you will find the film crossing your thoughts more than you might like to admit.