Another day, another self-centered Japanese man. I hate to reduce such an insightful portrait of festering evil, but after noting the rampant narcissism within Will I Be Single Forever?, I was ready to see a side of Japanese masculinity that wasn’t so toxic. Guess I’ll have to settle for the brow-beaten lad here.
It should be pointed out that Mr. Soeda (Arata Furuta) was a big jerk even before the tragedy. The middle-aged fisherman is a bully at work, a bully at home, and a bully in-between. The tragic event simply made everything worse. In fact, this whole film is ten minutes of unpleasant, one shocking tragedy, then more than an hour of extremely unpleasant as the wronged man takes out his pain on everybody but himself.
Mitsuru Soeda has a daughter in middle school. She’s shy, introverted, and oft caught in her own world. She doesn’t fit in; even the teachers pick on her a little. At home, dad is unimpressed with her lack of attention at the dinner table; he throws her phone out the window stating she doesn’t need it. At a local market the next day, the girl shoplifts some cosmetics. The store’s stockboy/owner (don’t ask) Naoto Aoyagi (Tori Matsuzaka) eyes the pilfer and chases the girl down the road.
And then the film changes dramatically. The girl dashes into the roadway blindly and gets run over. Twice. Dead. It’s jarring; and in the wake of this violent moment, the story is no longer about her; it’s about dad and his impressive anger. The entire rest of film is Mr. Soeda exacting justice … or whatever he thinks passes for it. And in Mitsuru Soeda’s attempt to find justice, the press gets involved, nobody does the right thing, and everybody has a bad day/week/month/year.
Unpleasant as it was to watch Intolerance, I cannot deny its power. The film decidedly and convincingly demonstrates
how anger or –for lack of a better word- Intolerance corrodes everything it touches. Mr. Soeda’s complete inability to find peace is his problem, but he compounds evil dramatically with his steadfast refusal to forgive the most penitent of souls. There’s a fascination in the film with how each tendril of this growing octopus of hate spreads out far and wide slowly killing everything that it touches.
There are a few films I wish were American and this is one of them, for there are few better metaphors out there for the MAGA crowd. This could come off as a strawman, but I don’t think it is – There is an immense amount of anger, whether justified or not, within the MAGA crowd. There is also the very human belief that “if I’m angry, I’m right.” This is a natural extension of the fear that prompts the worst of MAGA. The problem is anger doesn’t make you right, it just makes you Right, or more simply put, it makes you easily influenced and easily manipulated. This anger can lead to one really bad decision and before you know it, that terrible decision wears a red hat, tells 30,000 lies while in office, and foments an insurrection. When this bad decision is compounded by the two most notable aspects of the modern GOP, a lack of responsibility and a lack of accountability, the result is burgeoning fascism. Look at Intolerance. One man suffers great pain – not unlike many Americans- but instead of examining the roots of the tragedy: his monstrous demeanor, his daughter’s frailty, and just plain terrible luck, he seeks to blame and punish outside his bubble. This is the essence of MAGA: blaming others for your own bad choices. In general, MAGA, you don’t live smart, eat smart, save smart, think smart, or worship smart and you also keep voting for people who exploit your weaknesses over and over and over again, and yet your pain is always somebody else’s fault – immigrants, Democrats, CRT, socialism, cancel culture, libtards, BLM, Antifa, etc.… there’s never a self-examination in the MAGA community of how your own actions, your own words, and your own voting have undermined your own happiness. We could all have the country we want; the one where we are all free, healthy, wealthy, safe, and happy, but you would rather hate than adjust.
I’d say Intolerance NEEDS to be made in English and shown throughout red America, but, knowing MAGA, you wouldn’t watch it, and you wouldn’t understand the metaphor even if you did.
Mr. Soeda wasn’t anybody’s best mate
When a tragedy made his ego deflate
He could just absolve
And let problems resolve
But why build, when you can channel your hate?
Not Rated, 107 Minutes
Director: Keisuke Yoshida
Writer: Keisuke Yoshida
Genre: Lives you don’t want
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: People in pain
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: People in pain
