Chained for Life

"4¼/5⭐ + CHAINED FOR LIFE captures that kind of delusional, hive-minded, consensus thinking people tend to stray into when they inherit society's assumptions about any particular group of people, or accepted way of perceiving any given subject. It focuses on a film within a film about people with disfigurements played by people with real life conditions. It is perhaps one of the best film within a film movies I have seen. The way the actors go from the performance of the primary characters they play to the roles that their characters are portraying is done flawlessly. It uses this meta approach as a statement on our collective delusion of life and art, and how something as ordinary as a disfigurement can be romanticized to feed our delusional thinking. The way the characters themselves view certain things like film vs digital, or direct presentation vs poetic representation are funny in how they mimic real life people who have these debates. Or how they treat one of the actors (Rosenthal, played by Adam Pearson) with a tone-deaf attitude as a reaction to his condition with neurofibromatosis. They treat him as if the tumors growing on his body make him more than ordinary. His character reminds me a lot of Finbar McBride from THE STATION AGENT who gathers a lot of attention for simply being a little person. What is interesting in this film is how realistically they capture the nonchalant way the characters work with their running assumptions, and the collective delusional worlds they inhabit. Had I seen this film first and lived life after, I would think the dialogue and characters were written for satirical effect, but I feel like people tend towards this way of thinking in general; specifically in the way they idolize actors. This film plays with the commentary on perceived appearances right down to the way it is shot. It seems to live in another dimension of film where the director invites us to engage in more than one way with the material. Awesome movie."