Don't listen to the negative reviews

Am I Missing Something?

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

It is the lead trait of this profound beautiful film. The delicacy of a story about love and life and healing in deep sense. About hope. And about the other as part from yourself. The delicacy of performances. The delicacy of dialogues. It is a spiritual film but not in the sense you expects. It is support for reflection. And one of that small cinematographic gems with the status of gift.

Ellen Burstyn is perfect in this role and that is one of the reasons why the film is so engaging and hard to shake. Her portrayal of Edna is solid and personable.The film has always fascinated me and I've seen it many times. So many emotions come to the surface while watching this. But it is never manipulative nor does it seek out to bring people to tears. The acting is excellent by everyone and the dialog is also very well written. Even the most burnt out or jaded person will be enlightened by this great, great film.My DVD is the Universal Vault Series with no menu and no extras. Too bad because I would love to hear Ellen and the others talk about their experiences working on this. Don't miss this fantastic movie.

No spoiler here, but when Esco Brown lays his hand on Edna's head as he gives her his admonitions when she has barely met him (fairly early in the film), could anyone be surprised that the end of the movie shows her in that same scenario, ministering to those who need it as they happen in to the "service" station? The postcard that was shown in the last scene left no doubt that there was a connection between Esco and Edna. The inscription: "Hi, Edna. I made it!" (referring to Esco's stated dream of visiting an exotic locale in South America.) He had no doubts, and it was a beautiful culmination for Esco's character. The name of the station..."Last Chance" was oxymoronic. Some commenters have cast aspersions on the Sam Shepard character (Cal) as being unnecessary. However, Burstyn's agnostic character fairly demanded a Bible quoting antagonist who was more connected to Edna Mae than his more vocal father character (Earl) could have ever been. Hence...Cal is integral to creating conflict in the plot because the disagreements between Edna and her father could not have realistically been developed to that same dramatic level.The most unbelievable scene (to me) was when the hemophiliac girl's mother allowed Edna to hold the girl and unexpectedly heal the nosebleed despite the doctor's pronouncement that the little girl needed immediate transportation to treatment. This anomaly could have been dealt with by a mere juxtaposition of the timing of dialog, but the effect was dramatic as they left it.Edna's gift? Where did it come from? She explained it as she saw it. She wasn't sure (hence my term "agnostic" in the first paragraph.) However, she consistently alluded to a "higher power" even though she couldn't or wouldn't ascribe a name to that power. All she would say is "I offer it to you in the name of Love." Is Esco's sign on the wall of the "Last Chance" ("God is love and versa vice") the theme of this movie? Hmmm.Obviously I loved this movie. A spiritual uplifting. Perhaps it didn't receive popular acclaim is because it deals with phenomena that many of us have not seen with our own eyes.Fiction? Maybe.

***SPOILERS*** Surviving a deadly car crash where her husband Joe, Jeffrey DeMunn, was killed Mae McCaule,Ellen Burstyn, momentarily was declared dead in the hospital emergency room when all her vital functions flat-lined but then almost miraculously came back to life! It was later in the movie that Mae began to realize that not only was she given a second chance to live but was also a gift that in the end would almost cause her to die again at the hands of her crazed and bible thumping lover who's life she saved with that very gift that she received from beyond.It took a while for Mae to get her life back together again in her recuperation from the car crash that not only took the life of her husband Joe but also left her an invalid not able to walk. An incident earlier in the movie, after she came back to life in the hospital emergency room, in Mae's encounter with old man Esco Brown, Richard Farnsworth, on her way to Kansas to live with her father John, Robert Blossom, and Grandma Pearl, Eve Le Gallienne, may have had a far more greater impact on her life, besides Esco filling her gas tank with gaoling, then she at first thought. Esco a strange but friendly and personable sort of guy put Mae at ease in the stress that she at that time was going through. Later in the movie, when you had almost forgot about the old guy, we see that Mae in fact realized what he did for her in Mae herself doing somewhat the same thing, for a very sick and terminally ill little boy, that was completely overlooked in her initial encounter with Esco.I took a while for Mae to realize what the gift that she received from the result of her car accident was. It wasn't until she was able to cure herself of her paralysis that things started to really get a bit edgy with the people in and around town whom she lived with. You would think that curing the incurable would have made those who knew her as well as those like her boyfriend Carl Carpenter,Sam Shaperd, that Mae cured appreciate what she did for them. Instead a number of people that included Carl and his fire and brimstone bible thumping father Earl, Richard Hamilton, took Mae's kind unselfish and God-given abilities as being that of the Devil himself who was using Mae for his own evil purposes.The more proof, including controlled laboratory tests with ill and crippled persons, confirming Mae's miraculous powers being genuine came out the more both Earl and his by now very unstable son Carl began to suspect, with Mae not reciting any passages from the bible in her curing sessions, that the Devil had a hand in them. Which finally lead to Carl, now completely out of his cotton-picking skull, crashing a healing seminar headed by Mae where she almost got killed by the wild and crazy motorcycle riding and gun toting religious lunatic.Mae coming to the realization that whatever powers that she has are to be kept as much under the radar screen, or away from the public, as possible is now as the film ends, what seems like ten years later, running the same gas station/general store that the late Esco Brown did. Mae in effect is doing ,besides pumping gas and selling cold drinks and hard candies, what he was doing earlier in the movie in helping those who desperately needed his help without them really knowing about it. Mea is preforming miracles in that out of the way outpost in the middle of the vast and empty Arizona/Nevada Desert that may well be, to those who visit it, in the deepest recesses of one's mind as well as at the same time on the outer most fringes of what we conceive to be human reality. In that in between dimension of what's real and whats imaginary known to all of us as the "Twilight Zone".