You may very well think this is crazy, but in the last week, after having seen Tom Ford’s film “A Single Man” (2009) and then Vincente Minelli’s “Meet Me in St. Louis” (1944) — a film I was revisiting, having seen it years before — I came to the conclusion that, on a thematic level, they are essentially the same film.
Yes, one is an elegaic adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s bittersweet tale of a day in the life of a man contemplating suicide in 1962, and the other a classic uplifting Hollywood musical adapted from a series of short stories by Sally Benson. One would think the two films couldn’t be more different.
Yet to my surprise, I found the underlying message of the two works to be exactly the same. Essentially, both are saying that life is not about the big picture, the grand meaning, the heroic quest. Rather, the only true buttress we have against death, chaos, annihilation, is in the small details, the little connections with each other, the moments of discovered beauty in the ordinary course of a day. These are the things — the things we are often too busy to notice, in our headlong rush for meaning — that fill our lives with grace.
This is of course also the theme of Thorton Wilder’s “Our Town”, and many other works. It’s also a very Buddhist idea. Perhaps my week in Kyoto made me more aware of this dynamic. Perhaps I was drawn to see these two very different (yet oddly similar) films because I had just spent a week in Japan.