At Tribeca I was able to catch a press screening of The Place of No Words, director Mark Webber’s latest film. The film focuses around the relationship between a father (played by Webber) and his young son (played by Webber’s son Bodhi) in the months after the father is diagnosed with a terminal illness. Between the non-linear scenes of daily life that give the film its reality are fantasy sequences in which Mark and Bodhi are knights on a quest to find the lost “Freeka.”
Visually, The Place of No Words is stunning. The beautiful landscapes used for the fantasy sequences along with the tastefully restrained use of CGI make for some beautiful shots in a world that could have come right out of the mind of a child. Equally praiseworthy is the family dynamic captured between father, son, and mother (played wonderfully by Teresa Palmer but unfortunately extremely limited in screen time). It likely helped that the three are an actual family, and the legitimate intimacy between them comes through in the dialogue. Even in Bodhi’s fantasy world, Mark talks to his son more like a father to a young son than an adventurer to a squire.
Emotionally, the film is very compelling. Bodhi’s innocence makes his impending loss that much harder to bear, but the realized grief of Teresa and the rest of Mark’s friends keep the illness grounded in reality.
Towards the end, a message of “freedom” comes in that took me out of the film for a bit. I really couldn’t link it to anything else in the movie, and it shook the emotions I was feeling off to a point where I never really regained them. This film has a bit of a habit of making you get into your own head to search for something that may not have an answer. For example, many of the magical beings that populate Bodhi’s fantasy world have real life counterparts as Mark and Teresa’s friends, but this isn’t the case for everybody and it can get frustrating to try and piece together the significance of the differences and similarities between the characters.
For the visuals and the strength of the family chemistry, I would strongly recommend The Place of No Words. It may not be the best film to try to think too hard about, though. Like a child’s imagined fantasy, not every detail has to be immensely significant.
Sean Kelso is the editor-in-chief of CUFPe.