REIGN OVER ME
Movie Summary
I like this movie because is focus on cooping with lose and the things in life that really matter to a person. Charlie is unable to understand and to come to terms with the loss of his family so he degenerates psychologically in order to ignore that it ever happened. I think many people, myself included want to ‘go back to the way things were’ when times get tough; its kind of natural. Everyone at some point yearns to return to past home, something that is familiar, to take the stress away. Charlie does this and he acts like a child threw out the movie, he is selfish and needy; perpetuated by the fact that he doesn’t need a job to support himself.
Enters Dr. Alan Johnson. Alan is not an especially outstanding character but he does show the caring nature needed to help Charlie. The way he helps Charlie in this movie is important for everybody to understand. People surrounding Charlie are not bad intentioned, but none of them truly know how, or are willing to give it a shot, at helping him. His in-laws do not realize that they are vivid reminder of what he used to be like. Friends like his accountant and landlord are under the impression that he is fine the way he is. Only Alan, who is without knowledge of Charlie’s past, is able to help. Meeting someone without knowledge of your past when you have been surrounded by the opposite of it can be a powerful experience for anybody. It offers new hope and you are able to reinvent yourself. For Charlie it takes him back to before his terrible loss and he can play and joke around with Alan. Alan offers help and a release to Charlie while at the same time he takes away a youthful resolve and new viewpoint of right and wrong from his time with Charlie. It is not so much a classical friendship as much as a genuine one.
When we first meet both of them, they’re in a rut. Alan is just going threw the motions at home and in the work place. Charlie is ignoring the loss of his family and just going on like it didn’t happen. They meet and it sparks change in both of them; funny how being reunited with old friends can spark change like that. They spend time with one another and this helps to remove each one from the others world a little bit at a time.
Alan does more with Charlie than just urge him to talk about the past, because of this Charlie is able to open up to him. It really lessons like that in this movie that give me reason to love this movie. It’s a challenging movie about true friendship and what we all can learn from it. In the end Charlie is given the opportunity to come to terms with his loss on his own, with the help of friends which can be the best remedy for pain like that; not the psychiatry ward or with prescription drugs, but with human contact. Charlie needed to know that he wasn’t alone, and he found that in a friend like Alan.
