Anchors REVIEW
Dillon and Julia Jones. Former intimates meet by coincidence on a street outside a hotel in New York. He is a month away from getting married and she has just discovered that she and her husband are pregnant.
The conversation soon makes its way to the last time they were supposed to have met eleven years earlier. They had a planned dinner out. She did not show. He does not know why. He asks why she stood him up. She asks him why he did not come and look for her. She had only one friend in New York. He should have known where to look.
“Explain yourself,” he says.
“You knew where I was. Think about Dillon. You knew where I was. Guess. Rachel’s. I went to stay with the only other person I knew in the city. . . .”
He accuses her of abandoning him. She accuses him of not being persistent enough. They both assess their current partners in life and confess that, incentivized by stability, they have “settled” for something so much less real.
They both try to disconnect as they connect and it is clear that they have attachments and reservations. A poem I once wrote comes to mind.
Cautious and Interested
Intimacy.
To say that I am
Cautious and Interested
Involves understatement
On both sides of the conjunction.
“I tried to sneak out Jones, but we are in it now.” Dillon says at one point. He clearly believes that they should leave their previous commitments and rebuild what they once lost. “I don’t know how I messed this up or why I let you go,” he pleads. “We have these great memories,” she responds, “but at the end there is so much sadness.”
“They are anchors Julia. They bring us down and they drain us,” he insists. “They are anchors Julia.”
She responds, “You and me. We get each other completely and not a lot of people do but what just happened here, this isn’t a reason for us to be together. You know in a month from now you will be thinking about Marcy and what you gave up with her. . . .” “They are stable, and we are catastrophic,” she continues, “It is beautiful but it is so impossible.”
One senses the title of the film is about this dilemma and the metaphor of anchors. Anchors are things that keep you from speeding away and they are things that keep you from being blown away. Both of these two individuals realized when they were younger that they needed someone more stable – more responsible – less erratic – more practical. They moved in the direction of what they were not and gained balance at the cost of connection.
In the end, she seems to see having an anchor to keep her from blowing away as the better choice. He sees the anchor metaphor as a liability, keeping them from celebrating the creative playfulness at the heart of their personalities. It seems that the financial demands of life in the big city require them to find partners with more monetary values that can support them in their art even as they diminish the value of that art.
I cannot say that the conversation that I would have with certain people from my past would look like this. It wouldn’t. But nevertheless, I wish the conversation could be had.
Question for Comment: What would a conversation with some long-lost love look like for you?
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