Resurrection (1980)

Thanks for the memories!

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Not only (arguably) Burstyn's best role, but one of the few times that Hollywood has taken on the mystical (Near Death Experiences, Charismatic Healing) and totally nailed it. A little tongue-tied (not like me at all) because this is one of my favourite all-time films and I really don't want to spoil it for a viewer who has not seen it even once. Other reviewers have covered the story -- a woman of no special background undergoes a NDE and comes out of it with a special gift. The demonstration of this gift drags her life, kicking and screaming, into an entirely new direction. And brings upon her public scrutiny to a degree that only a politician could ever appreciate. To me the script itself is most noteworthy here -- it is beautifully constructed, maintains interest, treats the phenomena fairly, and manages to deal with the sensational and private side of the character, without bias either way. The ending is pitch-perfect, which, trust me, is a rarity for Hollywood. Highly recommended.

I'd just like to comment on one aspect of this movie: the ending. I've seen a ton of films in my life (37 years at this point), and I have to say that hands down the ending of this film is one of the best I have ever seen. It is SO subtle and non-pretentious that it's almost staggering. I have no doubt that in this day and age (2007) the ending would have been trashed in favor of something much BIGGER. I applaud EVERYONE involved for creating a bookend that has haunted me to this day (I am emotional just thinking about it).If there is ever a well publicized list of the best movie endings ever, I certainly hope this film is on it. It is definitely on mine.

***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".

Resurrection is an excellent film made over 25 years ago and it still holds up very well. Ellen Burstyn was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for the film. It is a surprising film in that you think you know where it is going, but you really do not know. It strongly deserves a new life on DVD.Contrary to what the trivia section states about this film, Ellen Burstyn was not pitched the script of Resurrection. In an interview with Burstyn by Blaise DiStefano, Burstyn states: "You know, Resurrection was a story that I had commissioned to be written, and it was inspired from the reading I was doing at the time on the re-emergence of the goddess and bringing the feminine into a religious figure."