Mindwalk is a philosophical talkathon that promotes a vision of the world as an interconnected whole even as its central trio barely interacts with anyone or anything else.
USA
3*
Director:
Bernt Capra
Screenwriters:
Floyd Byars
Fritjof Capra
Director of Photography:
Karl Kases
Running time: 110 minutes
Mindwalk is a film with talking heads. It engages in deep philosophical discussions about the complexity of life and the shortfalls of the Cartesian way of thinking. But it features very little human drama and completely ignores its spectacular setting, the Mont-Saint-Michel Abbey off the coast of France.
Written by Fritjof Capra, a physicist and expert in systems theory, and directed by his brother, Bernt, the film features a politician, a poet and a scientist ruminating at length on whether one can understand life by approaching it piece by piece, like a machine. Actually, it is mostly the scientist, Sonia Hoffman, doing the ruminating. As the clear proxy for the systems theorist who wrote the screenplay, Ingmar Bergman stalwart Liv Ullmann takes charge of the conversation and never lets up. Shifting back and forth between physics and philosophy, she elaborates in detail on the two fields and quickly plays the role of wise teacher lecturing to her curious students.
Sam Waterston plays Jack Edwards, a conservative Democratic senator who is fresh off an unsuccessful run for the White House and has come to France for a long weekend to recuperate. His longtime friend and former speechwriter, Thomas Harriman (John Heard), is living in Paris and accompanies him on his trip. No sooner do they land at Mont-Saint-Michel than they come across Sonia, who comes here to think big thoughts. But this is where the action, limited as it is, stops for the next 90-odd minutes. And what follows is scene after scene of Sonia explaining her “ecological” vision of the world that emphasises interconnectedness.
And yet, this intellectual trio is completely cut off. With rare exceptions, they do not interact with anyone but move about in empty spaces in and around the abbey. They resemble the electrons inside the vast expanses of the atom over which Sonia waxes lyrical. She is continuously in a position of power. Seemingly all-knowing, she is the one who teaches but speaks with the force and the tone of someone used to having to speak over people to convince them. Now and then, Waterston and Heard make quick quips or ask a question, but they are like well-read middle-schoolers attending a lecture for PhD students.
But given the setting, namely the famous abbey on an island that is only accessible on foot during low tide, it is astonishing that religion never features in their exchanges. Nor, for that matter, does Jack’s or Thomas’s personal life. And the conversation twists and turns at the whim of the speakers. Very little is based on the actual environment they move through. This is a truly breathtaking lack of imagination and creativity and proves the film’s real purpose: to educate rather than to entertain.
Sonia swings wildly between pure physics and the heavy burden of being connected to (and, therefore, responsible for) everything. She even appears to promote Béchamp’s terrain theory by pointing to the relative difference in cost between maintaining a healthy diet and paying for a medical procedure because of bad eating habits. But what she is talking about is nothing short of a systemic overhaul where the modern world (and politicians, like Jack) prioritise quick fixes and incremental change, if any. She mentions the Native Americans making decisions by considering their impact seven generations down the line. And there are some worthy insights about the impact of our perception on the thing we perceive.
These are all interesting thoughts, but in a narrative vacuum, they struggle to breathe and ultimately suffocate under their own weight. There is a very meek attempt to show that Sonia does not, in fact, have all the answers. She has a strained relationship with her daughter, who is always in a huff, and seems to live a very solitary life with her books and her theories. But Mindwalk offers us no insight into her life, and she shows no signs of personal development.
Every now and again, Thomas quotes a philosopher (“as Heraclitus once said…”) or a mythical figure (“as Merlin once said to King Arthur…”) or recites an entire poem (Pablo Neruda’s “Enigmas”), however tangentially relevant to the conversation. But no connections are as bad as the filmmaker’s attempts to jump from one scene to another. The cuts are hard and sharp and there is no winding down of a comment, just a realisation that the scene has come to an end, and it’s time for a change of locale.
Although it is unclear how far Jack came in the race for the presidency, his mere presence here should provide a rich opportunity to investigate the potential for implementing Sonia’s ideas in practice. Jack freely admits he is beholden to lobbyists and the whims of his constituents, but his tendency to compromise is at odds with the paradigmatic shift that Sonia desires. And yet, this clash of approaches is never seriously tackled. All three seem to agree that all of this talk of change is hopelessly impractical, at least within the current system. But no one is willing to change the system itself; they would rather be content with merely discussing the benefits of living in a different system.
The film, bereft as it is of narrative development, could easily have been staged as a theatre play instead. What saves it from utter mediocrity is the performances of its three leads, who all do the best they can under the circumstances. Waterston, in particular, conveys a genuine empathy and intellectual curiosity to stand in for those viewers who find this kind of thing more appealing.
Mindwalk is not a work of entertainment, not by a long shot. It is a video with a single purpose: For Capra to have something to screen for his first-year systems theory students on their first day of class. The question is not “Why is there something rather than nothing?” but “Why is there something when it mostly consists of nothing?” We could easily ask the same of the film.