The movie's key scenes take place with Maggie among the old people, and the screenplay by Susannah Grant (based on the novel by Jennifer Weiner) establishes them as characters who have lived their lives well by accumulating experience and instinctively knowing how to deal with the likes of Maggie.
The Professor, who taught college English, is especially important to Maggie. He wants her to read to him, gently helps her understand the technique and purpose of reading and guides her through possible dyslexia. He needs a reader because he is blind, and that is important, too, because Maggie has maybe been thinking a lot about what Rose told her: "You're not going to look like this forever, you know." She knows the Professor doesn't like her for her looks. She reads him "One Art," a poem by Elizabeth Bishop that is about "the art of losing," and as a woman who has made a life style out of misplacing people, possessions and responsibilities, Maggie finds it strangely comforting, and does some offscreen reading on her own, setting up a powerful appearance later in the film of the e.e. cummings that begins:
i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear ...
There are various male characters in the movie, attached to various possibilities of hearts being, or not being, carried in other hearts. But the movie is really about the transformation of the women, of all three women. That's what's surprising: This isn't simply about Maggie being worked on by Ella and Rose, but about how her growth nudges both of the other women into new directions.
"In Her Shoes" starts out with the materials of an ordinary movie and becomes a rather special one. The emotional payoff at the end is earned, not because we see it coming as the inevitable outcome of the plot, but because it arrives out of the blue and yet, once we think about it, makes perfect sense. It tells us something fundamental and important about a character, it allows her to share that something with those she loves, and it does it in a way we could not possibly anticipate. Like a good poem, it blindsides us with the turn it takes right at the end.
This movie by Curtis Hanson comes after "L.A. Confidential" (1997), "Wonder Boys" (2000) and "8 Mile" (2002) with Eminem. Three completely different movies, you'd think, and yet all bound by a common thread, the transformative power of the written word. The first is about gossip journalism, the second about writers on a campus, the third about a hip-hop poet. Now a life is changed by reading.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46ipWaglad6tLTOnqpmamBlgg%3D%3D