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Thursday, September 4, 2014

Reaching for the Moon (2013)

This movie is about the life of the poet Elizabeth Bishop.  She was a shy and unconfident poet who had great promise, but she was not one who enjoyed the spotlight at all.  Perhaps part of her hesitation in life was that she was gay and it was the 1950's.  She decided at one point that she would take a trip to Brazil to visit an old friend, Mary, from college, someone who was also gay.  She very quickly and deftly charms Mary's lover, the architect Lota de Maceda Suares, a woman who has enough confidence for all three of them--leaving Mary the odd woman out.

Elizabeth had two big problems.  the first was alcohol, which at least as far as the movie goes she was on occasion able to control, but the tension of living under the same roof with her lover and her lover's former lover--a woman obviously still in love with Lota--was a lot to bear.  The second problem was that her father died when she was an infant and her mother died when she was a child--she never leThe problem with movies about real people is that sometimes they are not all that likable, and the movie does suffer a bit from that, but overall quite enjoyable as a movie, and it streams on Netflix.

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