I loved this movie for embracing the working class background of Pittsburgh.
We pretend that there is not an issue of class in America. So as Americans we are “off the hook” and don’t think about it a whole lot, while the gap between the haves and the have-nots grows even larger. Usually it is only foreign films which offer stories about the poor or the working class.
Television and film focus on people with beautiful homes, kitchens you see in magazines and lives that seem unreal. In Eat, Pray, Love Julia Roberts travels the globe and falls in love which worked in real life for Elizabeth Gilbert, but most of us could not afford to leave work for 6 months and not worry about finances.
I think it’s important to be aware of class. We moved out of an affluent area to the neighborhood where the birthday party was shot in The Next Three Days. Living where we do makes me feel grateful and sensitive to hardship instead of OMG we’ll never have “real money” like everyone else, which happened where we used to live. I could never live in a “gated” community, because it nurtures what is unreal. Moving realigned my frame of reference. There is an everyday clarity to what is enough.
In this movie, there is nothing fancy about the homes where people live. This movie will not generate envy and yearning for more.
I loved going to Moondogs to hear the R & B singer Bettye LaVette sing “I do not want what I haven’t got.” because she made those words so real & you know she earned them because they ring so true.
I heard Andrew Ross Sorkin, the NY Times reporter who wrote Too Big to Fail at the Drue Heinz lectures. He said that in interviewing all the wall street men who steered the financial ship into free fall; the one thing that stood out to him about these pillars of power, was that they were people just like us. So are we all, in all the ways that we live.
