Well Deserved Praise

It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

David Lynch is a tough act to get into and The Elephant Man is perhaps his most mainstream work. But even a mainstream Lynch film is abstract and The Elephant Man- based on the true story of John Merrick is filled with imagery and allegories that might bore the watcher. Make no mistake- this is a good movie and the performance of John Hurt as the titular character is so good I think it's a joke he did not win an academy award for it. Hauntingly photographed and well acted by everyone from Anthony Hopkins to Anne Bankcroft this is an artistic film and needs a certain mindset to be viewed.

The dramatic content is obvious in this movie; a major departure from Lynch's original style (remember that this is right after "Eraserhead"). While "Eraserhead" is nightmarish, cold, highly disturbing and surrealist, "The elephant man" is dramatic and more stylized; and very dark; a somehow rare combination: dramatic and dark; it aimed towards a totally different direction - drama and biography. In "Eraserhead", Lynch shocked the audience with unreal nightmarish images and events, cold and emotionless characters and dystopian-ish images; here, his purpose was to leave the audience drowning in tears - there are characters full of emotions, emotional scenes, extreme sadness, sadness and again sadness and everything is marked with stunning and exquisite imagery related to the industrial revolution (+ symbolic imagery). Probably Anthony Hopkins' first real big performance; John Hurt has also done a really good job here. A movie that questions humanity and the principles of morality.

''Why are people afraid of the 'unknown' ?'' I was very touched. I liked it the acting of Anthony Hopkins and John Hurt very much. I'm surprised that John did not get an Oscar. We see our prejudice is always a shadow. Unlike other Lynch films at a more understandable level. John Merrick: I am not an elephant! I am not an animal! I am a human being! I am a man!

This is a very early film in Lynch's professional career, his 1st major studio production following his much more personal, intimate and outrageously bizarre masterpiece, Eraserhead. That freshman effort is perhaps Lynch's most pure expression of cinematic artistry—a fiercely idiosyncratic, absurdly inscrutable gesture of audio/visual mischievous of the most masterful kind. Contained within Lynch's debut feature length movie can be found the bulk of the sublime ideas and ingenious cinematic techniques which infused all his later films with such shockingly vivid & visceral emotionalism. Eraserhead is such a powerfully effective bit of cinematic wizardry that upon witnessing it—no, upon being assaulted by it!—Mel Brooks was convinced that its mad genius creator had to be the director of the unusually odd film which he was producing, and thus David Lynch was hurled into the gaping, yawning, voracious orifice that is Hollywood film-making. Luckily, David Lynch had a magnificently talented cast (Anthony Hopkins, John Gielgud, Anne Bancroft, Freddie Jones, and of course a brilliant John Hurt) as well as a superb script (Christopher De Vore, Eric Bergren & David Lynch) with which to fashion his quaint Victorian period piece/archly Gothic nightmare monster movie. The narrative is strikingly concise and terse, almost bleak in its unadorned simplicity, yet more than ample to support the gargantuan mass of barely tolerable pathos which burdens nearly every scene. That's not to say it's a tortuous slog—no, not hardly. The Elephant Man is only as emotionally crushing as David Lynch has astutely calculated we can endure, and it regularly assumes a surprisingly delicate & buoyant demeanor. In other words, it's an intensely disturbing, wonderfully rich & rewarding emotional roller coaster. Lynch's monster is a ghastly creature dwelling in the darkest, dankest recesses of the human psyche, and it's by dragging us kicking & screaming down to those formidably threatening depths that he's able to then kindly usher us to the shimmering splendor of an equally remote but welcoming inner realm where resides compassion, empathy & genuine humanity. It seems it's only by directly facing life's most daunting, most ugly, most horrific truths can we hope for any real joy, or at least any relief. That's heavy, isn't it?