rocek
When I rented this, I had no idea what to expect. In my opinion, it is a brilliant deadpan surreal comedy. Daniel Day Lewis's fierce quest to spread dental hygiene consciousness in Patagonia is utterly absurd but told as if it is the most natural and ordinary thing in the world. From his confrontation with a bandit who comes to him to have a tooth pulled to his theological debate with an elderly monk who refuses treatment, every inane adventure is told with complete conviction. After he learns that pandas have trumped dentistry, he must face despair, self-doubt, and self-loathing. Daniel Day Lewis is an astonishing actor--he is a complete chameleon who becomes whoever he acts. He is always different; consider My Beautiful Laundrette, a Room with a View, My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father, The Unbearable Lightness of Being--each role is utterly unlike the other. In Eversmile, New Jersey, you can see what Daniel Day Lewis might have been like in a Monty Python movie. Finally, the footage of Patagonia is bleak and stunning. That alone would be enough to make the movie worth seeing.
Poor Yorick
This movie is an astounding achievement. Light-hearted, ironic, farcical, profound. 15 years after first watching it, I still love this film. Daniel Day Lewis' performance is mesmerizing. Mirjana Jokovic keeps up with him all the way. If only more movies could be so well cast. Fergus O'Connell (Lewis) fights a religious war against dental disease, reveres the great traveling dentists of the past, dedicates himself, mind, body, and soul, at every turn, to bringing his good news to everyone. But the world is filled with evil, misunderstanding, and corruption. His ideas threaten the dentist-sun theory of another practitioner. He is harassed and then seduced by evildoers. On a bad day, his lofty ideals fail him as he reacts with irrational fury to the mockery of the ignorant masses. Priests and thugs are equally blessed as he walks among them, bringing them all to dental salvation. In the end he comes up with a bizarre remarkable answer to the world's problems.This movie is low-budget, art-house, and deceptively straight-laced. It is all things which it isn't.
Bowserb46
I don't know if this qualifies as *spoiler*, but ...Am I the only one who saw these two leading characters as Jesus Christ and Mary Magdelene? In that context, the whole movie starts to make sense, in a metaphorical way, that is.Just get out your New Testament and start tracking the scenes in this movie. This is the last years of the life of Christ. And the final scene is clearly the resurrection, isn't it? I didn't recognize it until about halfway through the first time it aired on HBO (or Showtime, or TMC, etc.) when it suddenly hit me. Temptation, the merchants at the Temple, and so on.
beglenrice
I rented this because of Daniel-Day Lewis, who stars as a traveling dentist. All I can say is that it is so bizarre you should not watch it alone. You might find yourself going insane. It's not that the movie has any strange or bizarre effects, it's completely straightforward. To find out what I'm talking about you'll have to see for yourself. I'll also add the Day-Lewis was incredible, and he is the best actor I have ever seen.
AD
