Movie article

I remember well the song Something’s Missing (In My Life), the version sung by Marcia Hines. But it touched on issues I thought were redundant. Not according to this song.

You must experience something’s missing, to know something’s missing in your life.

Marcia sung about a relationship or love being the missing link. “Maybe it’s you. Maybe it’s you and me”.

The song brought the thought of a missing, absent or lacking part in humans, into the popular consciousness. Though it has been explored many times before in other forums, such as in psychology, psychiatry, religion and spirituality, and some art house films made certain viewers see that life can make you feel empty and what can be done about that?

Mainstream Hollywood has also been saying something is missing.

About a Boy (2002), based on the novel by British author Nick Hornby, has an older man living the Life of Riley, played by Hugh Grant.

Grant’s most popular film at the time was Oscar nominated comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral, but this one put him in a slightly different light, which you would not call ‘popular’.

That is because Will,  played by Grant in About a Boy, lives off the royalties of his father’s one-hit wonder, an older Holiday tune.

Just living off someone’s hard work is sure to make every worker cringe. Will does not even feel a responsibility to work, so his work ethic is bare minimum.

On the other hand, workers may be secretly jealous that he won the ‘jackpot’.

There are other things that could make audiences cringe. Maybe Will is bored, so he looks to hook up with ladies at a solo parents group, pretending he is a solo Dad, and doing a great job of it. He convinces Victoria Smurfit’s character that he is the real thing.

In going to the solo parents group, is he ‘unconsciously’ looking for that missing connection, though?

He is introduced to a solo mother who is depressed and needy with a 12-year old boy. It’s not what he had in mind, to get too personally involved and committed to helping people with kids. He is getting too close for comfort, now.

But this lonely man rolls with it, and something inside of him awakens.

In this new place, he finds reality, which is something of worth, which centers him.

To be brief, the science fiction A.I. (2001) and romantic drama Always (1989), both directed by Steven Spielberg, are about human beings—and a child robot in the case of A.I.—missing something in their lives, but who find an unlikely resolution.

In these films, and others, Hollywood is telling us there is a human void or something missing, but this can be filled.

Maybe telling us that the ‘hole in the soul’ can be filled is the romantic in Hollywood, a fairy tale ending.

Though in real life, filling the missing part of life is just as compelling.