User Reviews

However truthful to Elizabeth Bishop's tragic love affair with Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares, Bruno Barreto's Reaching for the Moon is more generally engaged with the question: Is the examined life worth suffering?

In this corner, Elizabeth (Miranda Otto), a wan, fragile, painfully timid and insecure poet who is mortified to hear one of her poems read aloud. In her insecurity and sense of powerlessness she is Woman. She dresses like an office manager's wife and wears her hair tight to her face. She compulsively observes and anatomizes her observations. Her life is at first nothing but her examining it.

In contrast Lota has a large strong face, flowing long hair, a man's stocky build, and a man's aggressive stride and nature. She never questions herself or her impulses and she has the money not just to do what she wants but to get others to do so too. When she tells Elizabeth that she and her current amour, Elizabeth's college friend Mary (Tracy Middendorf), were just roommates, she admits Mary hasn't thought that. Probably Lota hasn't either. To draw Mary back into her fold as a friend Lota buys her a child.

Lota is also creative, designing her sumptuous country estate and — after she helps friend Carlos (Marcello Airoldi) get elected Governor — designs and supervises the construction of a large public park, with towering standards to provide the magic of moonlight. But she's not a thinker, a meditator. She just acts. Not given to self-analysis, when the new guest Elizabeth arrives Lota leaps to wrong conclusions about her.

Part of their antithesis is cultural. As Elizabeth drunkenly tells the Rio audience at her National Book Awards dinner, "How can someone raised in the desert swim like a fish?" The withdrawn Elizabeth doesn't understand the Brazilian exuberance, constant joy, and carefreeness, as they celebrate everything — even after the military coup has reduced their freedoms.

But the contrast is mainly in the women's character. Still, though Lota is the first to express her love for Elizabeth — which the poet only reciprocates when Lota is asleep — in their first clinch Elizabeth assumes the ardent initiative. And despite -- or because of -- her relentless analyzing, Elizabeth is an alcoholic.

With her deep pessimism and self-doubt, Elizabeth stumbles from success to success: the Pulitzer, the NBA, a slot in The New Yorker, the man Aldous Huxley's approval, a teaching gig at NYU. Her life examining works for her.

But the ebullient, confident Lota breaks down at her first defeat: the new government corrupts her vision of the park, converting it into the cliché sterile paved soccer court. When Elizabeth asks if her going to New York caused Lota's depression, Mary clearly blames the ruin of her project. "How could you think anyone could be that confident?"

For her part, Mary begins as a jejeune, non-thinking sort who doesn't expect her college friend to steal her lover. Dumped, Mary realizes she has "no other option" than to love Lota. But by film end she has learned to read people and situations. Motherhood may have taught her wariness. When she aborts Elizabeth's correspondence with Lota it is not out of selfish malice, but because she knows that Lota's losing Elizabeth again would destroy her. Events prove her right.

Hence the poem Elizabeth ends too soon at the start of the film and rounds out at the end. "The art of losing isn't hard to master." Not if you're a thinker. The frightened self- doubter sees enough loss to handle her own and not just thrive but survive. The robust willful woman who never paused to consider human vulnerability is defeated by her first loss — and kills herself at the second.

A gentle movie about relationships between three women. (Yes, I say three women as Mary lived with Bishop and Lota until the latter die.) And as every human relationship it is permeated with high, low and ... drama moments. When it comes to women it seems that directors never forget the drama.

Blend together alcoholism, passion, money and drama and you have a genuine, feasible film, if based on true events.

It feels that the characters lack in depth a little bit, but in this movie that was a good thing to me since the movie did not intend to replicate accurately the events (hence it is not possible to truly know what happened) . Therefore, t is up to the viewer to infer the finest nuances of those people based on the most general outlines shown in the film.

It is a film to be savored and reflected as the years pass by within the plot.

Elizabeth Bishop and her lover Lota de Macedo Soares must have had a pretty rocky relationship—Lota ended up killing herself—but you'd never know it from this very prim and proper biopic. The filmmakers tone down any elements that might disturb or challenge a target audience looking not for historical accuracy (or even good drama) but rather for inspiring role models. So Bishop and de Macedo Soares are shown as two strong, successful, and loving women who never let little problems like raging alcoholism, rampant ruling-class careerism, or crushing egomania get them down, until the final reel, when the whole movie comes off the rails.

Consider the scene where Elizabeth bakes a birthday cake for her beloved, who stands her up. What happens when self-obsessed Lota finally shows up, only to find Elizabeth sleeping off a bender? "Oh, you so hurt my feelings!" "Oh, so sorry, lovey-poo!" A little kissy-kissy and it's all better. Sorry, I ain't buying it. How much closer to the truth (not to mention more interesting, and believable) if this scene had erupted in a screaming row a la "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", with the bitter, alcoholic American vs. the brazen Brazil nut. Alas, that would never do in a movie that's all about role models, not real people who really lived, and really ended up in mental hospitals and really committed suicide.

When Lota does go certifiably crazy, this development seems to come from nowhere, since we haven't been shown a clue that anything was wrong with her or her perfect world. In real life, there's always a telltale breadcrumb trail leading to the nervous breakdown, but not in this movie. Lota just all of a sudden goes crazy. Go figure.

Despite its glossy veneer, this is a deeply phony movie, a deceptive testament to a poet and an architect who both deserve to be more realistically portrayed on the screen. Maybe someday we'll see a competent documentary about these two women, their achievements, and their complex relationship, instead of this beautifully shot, polite and pandering excuse for a biopic.

Reaching for the moon So happy I saw this at preview. To test a film we were made to wait one hour almost while they got an unlock code to the digital file! If that isn't a test I can't think of another. This film passed across this barrier with aplomb. Both actor do a commendable job. The location is magic, a valley of lush greenery just outside Rio Janeiro Brazil. The relationship depicted works with the strange sub plot of the other woman r remain and bringing up baby, quite bazaar when you think back. For me the greatest pleasure might be discovery of Elizabeth bishop poems. I feel very fortunate to have added these to my experience of human condition. Further test I will see this film again tomorrow, not 2 weeks since the first viewing. A most unusual thing for me, the relentless consumer of movie's. The things that will hold are the script the locations, the cinematography, and so the direction. To discover the gestation of this movie over what 20 years and the passion that held the project alive to it's realization on screen are a compliment to all involved.! It'd be hard not to enjoy this film and opened to a world ratified and rarely accessible.