Into the Wild Spiritual of “Buster’s Mal Heart”
We are a cosmic mistake that we get this far.
Sarah Adina Smith is intrigued with the reality of life and spiritual crisis. Her latest movie Buster’s Mal Heart wonderfully and philosophically questions these topics while she tells the American dream narrative.
As we know, America is the land of freedom and opportunity, a place where everyone has the free will to build future from the scratch. However, Jonah who is played by Rami Malek (Mr. Robot star), is far away from being free and fear.
Set the film a pre-2000 that mirrors uncertainty and fear, the writer-director Sarah Adina Smith suggests a story about a man with the multi-dimensional characters in a mind-bending timeline. She portrays Jonah as the man on the boat, fugitive mountain man called Buster and a night-shift concierge at the airport hotel who married to Marty and the father of Roxy. The movie also features a cameo appearance from DJ Qualls who comes in at the hotel as the Y2K conspiracy theorist.
In one life, Jonah was happy and grateful for what he had. He got a wife and a kid he loves more than anything. He also got the best job he could get. What was a lack in his life is owning a piece of land, get respect and becoming a self-sufficient individual.
He keeps dreaming about those idea. But he ends up struggling to get through a personal crisis in his life in the kind of lifeless and drab place. Ironically, he wanted to be a good man, but he hopelessly can’t fight the cosmic machine and it also ends up with the tragedy that caused from his good deeds.
Soon I realize it’s actually a sad story that reflects the broken American Dream in nutshell, as his manager told Jonah, the hotel is like a little America. He actually trapped on the rotten system that sucks his soul and challenges his existence, like the most of us.
As concierge Jonah, he clearly doesn’t have the freedom. From his story, I’d like to think it reminds me of Nietzsche notions about freedom of the will. “Man wills the good, “God” wills the good, and yet evil happens,” argues him in The Antichrist.
After the tragedy, we finally can piece together the events. We see Buster finds himself as the last free man on earth by breaking into empty mansions. “He is free and escapes from everything that works and doing his own way,” once Jonah explained to his kid when they saw a naked cartoon.
Buster here is the opposite of Jonah’s life. But does he have the freedom? Still no. He fails to survive in the mountain and keeps breaking into homes for food and shelter. He wants to be free and doesn’t know how to be free anymore so he asks God in the mountain and still got no luck. Interestingly, the man on the boat is the other Jonah who is forced to have a conversation with God. He doesn’t want to talk to Him, like Jonah and The Whale story in the Bible. “God is not merciful,” he said.
Three men here conclude the moral and inner conflict inside of Jonah. After all, there are much more binaries in this film as we have in every other person.
Buster’s Mal Heart is the slow and mind-bending timeline film that I think a sort of the grown-up version of Donnie Darko and some free will conversation movies.
