I beg to differ with the negative review that I saw at this movie's page. I enjoyed William Hurt's manic portrayal of one man's desperate search for truth. Granted, it's a selfish, often self-flagellating journey that quickly becomes nihilistic in the extreme, but it's not so much the journey, it's the destination, n'est ce pas? He finally does find his truth and redemption, and I was quite relieved to see it happen after all the pseudo-scientific mumbo-pocus that was used to bring us to the brink of destruction/enlightenment along with Dr. Jessup. Jessup's angst and subsequent travail of self-destructive discovery in an attempt to find the "meaning of it all" is such an apt metaphor for anything we humans use as a substitute for love and acceptance, vulnerability and trust to give meaning to our lives, i.e., alcohol abuse, drug abuse, eating disorders, quack/fundamentalist religions, UFOlogy, psychic quackery, et al. Name your poison! It's the same manic, self-deceptive, self-destructive pursuit that we find reproduced here in stunning, eye-popping detail, and which consequently finds resonance within me as a movie viewer. I could go on and on about the archetypal symbolism that Director Ken Russell used as well, but these paradigms and icons of American culture, and some of it's darker elements seem all too familiar as we share Dr. Jessup's descent into madness. The biblical imagery in particular was most disturbing, and yet strangely familiar. All of the over-powering devastation of Dr. Jessup's ordeal gives a wonderful sense of simple beauty and grace to his redemption and his discovery of that universal human truth: love.
