POWDER
A film review by Gerard Martin
Copyright 1995 Gerard Martin
Directed by : Victor Salva
Written by : Victor Salva
Starring : Sean Patrick Flanery, Lance Henriksen,
Mary Steenburgen, Jeff Goldblum
Wreathed in tragedy, POWDER begins with a first vestige of human existence; a new life is abruptly born into our world while another, his mother, departs.
The new-born child is alone for the first time in his short life. Just how alone, it seems, he will also remember for the rest of his life.
Nicknamed Powder for his powder-white albino skin, this newborn is aware of everything and everyone around him. The wired devices measuring his brain activity completely blacken the extreme limits of the measurement scale.
Years later, the young man Powder, played by Sean Patrick Flanery, remembers every detail of his life--the loss of his mother; abandonment as a baby by his father; and the many works of literature that he absorbed while down in the comfortably dark cellar of his grandparent's farmhouse. He was surrounded by shelves of books that he will remember word for word for the rest of his life. Interspersed against walls are diverse toylike devices of his own construction.
The story really begins the day that both of his grandparents are dead; his grandfather being the last of the two to pass away. Still a minor, he becomes ward of the state and, for the first time in his life, he is joined with the ranks of humanity; his grandparents having served as living buffers during the entirety of his early life. For reasons of fear or ignorance, they had even stopped touching him. It seems that Powder holds a frighteningly unique relationship with the adverse forces of the heavens.
A series of far-reaching metaphors express profound notions about life. At the orphanage that doubles as a boy's reform school, Powder arrests the attention of the more unfriendly of their number by dramatically magnetizing the mealroom's entire collection of spoons save one. Held together into one giant clump of silverware and food, the one spoon remaining flits across the table to join the clump only to realize it crash apart into individual pieces again. Not too much longer into the story, the presence of a science lab arc lamp reveals Powder's unearthly relationship with the electrical forces.
Other special abilities are revealed. Powder is close enough to humanity to feel another's feelings--to actually listen to people from the inside. In an episode involving a hunter, he is even able to transfer the fear and sickness of an animal's near death to life-numbing effect. A sports-hunter's life, needless to say, is changed forever.
Time and time again, the bits and pieces of life are challenged. The firmest pillars of society are undermined one by one. A sheriff and his deputy must yield everything they believes to a higher plane of existence. Otherwise Powder might really be a threat to all that is unifying about life--all things normally unanswered or unasked.
Where does our soul go after death? To what extent might we not even exist except as small parts of everything else? Are we substantial enough to allow life to be cordially reduced to electrical impulses only to be reconstructed into re-animated vitalizing forces of existence?
There is always much happening just under the surface of POWDER. What is the pure essence of life? High school science teacher Donald Ripley, played smartly by Jeff Goldblum, would have life reduced to the smallest possible elements--molecules governed by carefully controlled and ordered impulses of electricity. As some of these basic assumptions are challenged, levels upon levels of meaning are revealed in Ripley's gleaning insights, relentless further questioning and his relooking closely at the elements that comprise the basis of life and living.
POWDER is a beautiful film to watch as the narrative unfolds with every change of scenery. There are incredible compositions that involving pure light, meaningful colour and revealing shadow. There is the whiteness of powder against the drab contours of broken inner lives. The surface layer of order and understanding is shattered against what lies just below, under the surface and perhaps, ultimately, holding all of the pieces together in a discerning order of arrangement.
In a discourse that is very much alive in this closing of the millennium, humanity is pitted against technology as the one is divided from the other.
-- gmartin@well.com
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