There once was an advertising campaign for tapioca which claimed people either love it or hate it. (If you hate it, they're lumps; if you love it, they are surprises.) I just watched a movie that seems to have the same sort of effect on people.
The movie is August Rush. The actors (excepting Robin Williams in a supporting role) are pretty much lightweight. The individual scenes are sufficiently realistic so as to maintain a veneer of verisimilitude, but the overall plot is entirely implausible. And many people see nothing of value in the film. They hate it.
But I didn't.
Now, it is true that I didn't believe the plot, not after the first few minutes. And it is also true that the beautiful people portrayed by the adult leads are a bit beyond what I can accept as realistic -- although I do point out that in the flashback to their first meeting, despite the dreamlike character of the scene, several physical imperfections are allowed to remain visible.
The music is good, but I'm not near enough to being a musician that I can tell how good the music is. The various melodies should have flowed together, and they should have supported the plot at some deep level of harmony and counterpoint, and I think that maybe they did, but I'm not skilled enough to be sure.
What I did find in the movie was a statement of faith. Faith that in some way we are all interconnected. Faith that to some extent, at least, we may be able to touch each other outside of the distant and objective means with which we usually conduct our affairs. A faith which in this movie is expressed by the metaphor of music. Music which is everywhere, if you can hear it.
I think that if this faith touches and echoes your own, if it stands parallel to your own experience of life, then you would be among those who love the movie and you would call the implausibilities "surprises". But if this is not your experience of life, you will certainly find the movie to be full of lumps.
This is only appropriate, if my interpretation is correct. If the movie is about being connected with life in a way that you have never been connected, how can the movie touch you? How can you connect with an artistic statement about something which you have never experienced? But if the story expresses life as you know it, life as you have found it in some deep and unexplained way, then for all of its flaws it will touch you deeply.
I don't know if loving and hating are truly typical of people's experience of tapioca pudding; I can't see any reason why there shouldn't be a continuum of appetite for any particular food. I can see how a movie like August Rush can divide its viewers into separated camps based on whether each person has had this experience of life or has only had experiences of other kinds.
A tapioca movie is good for those of us who love it. I give this one five stars out of five -- for myself.
But a tapioca movie only touches audiences where they are now. A truly great movie would draw us from where we have been to something beyond our past experience. A truly great movie would rate five stars out of five for somebody else. In the context of August Rush a great movie would convince the doubters that a universal connection to other people and to the universe at large is plausible, that the music is truly there to be listened to.