<PERSON>
Almost everything there is to love about <PERSON> is present in this film. His biggest directorial virtue virtue is his staging and blocking, most notable here in a shot where <PERSON> finds <PERSON> begging on the bridge and looks on from the left side of the frame as people cross from background into foreground. There are other striking moments as well— when everyone listens to <PERSON> tell his story and when <PERSON> first sees the "Mantis," to name a couple. But also present are his shortcomings as a moralist and storyteller.
<PERSON> divides society into Good People, Bad People, and Victims, with the latter sometimes evoking the former but the Bad People never crossing into Victims (or vice-versa). The "<PERSON>" woman speaks convincingly of having been raped multiple times as a child, but <PERSON> only takes her tragedy so seriously before revealing it as a sob story that sets up another (near) kill. We don't see her again; whether her story was true or false is inconsequential, and future opportunities to see how circumstances can lead people to immorality or largely the realm of occasional lip service rather than embedded into the drama itself. 295
Indeed, the other victims of the story, <PERSON> and <PERSON>, are children, symbols of hope more than people.
<PERSON> is an admirer of <PERSON>; he adapted The Idiot, and the <PERSON> plotline here is based on Humiliated and Insulted. But much of what makes <PERSON> work is the impassioned and compelling arguments that characters—often the most astute, convincing, and likable of the cast—set forth in favor of ideas and worldviews that are ultimately rejected (<PERSON> is the best example of this). In <PERSON> there is always the possibility that moral virtue will be misrecognized, and redemption (either explicitly or implicitly religious) is an important part of a character's journey. In Red Beard there is never any doubt as to what is Right and what is Wrong, and <PERSON>'s "redemption"—in wishing to be the Shogunate's doctor rather than work at a rural clinic before reversing— is similarly rote. <PERSON> and <PERSON> are complicated figures; they are Good People, Bad People and Victims all at once in a way Red Beard's characters are not.
It's worth noting that <PERSON> is not always so simple. Both Stray Dog and High and Low revel in the proximity the culturally-anointed Good People of the world have with the bad folks, and both films are at their best as they attempt to collapse that boundary. High and Low is particularly great when it takes us on a tour of the poor, urban area, leading to a riveting conclusion that suggests circumstance, not individual moralism, is the primary separator between these two poles; Red Beard has opportunities to make a similar argument but largely lets them pass by.
There is a moment, however, where <PERSON> achieves the depth of feeling that has proven so elusive for me in his work: when <PERSON> first hears the cooks screaming <PERSON>'s name into the well to "call him back" from death, the urgency with which she sprints to the well and the pain and longing in her voice as she calls his name is the type of scene that justifies not only films, but entire careers. 285