Peneflix MOVIE REVIEWS BY PENEFLIX
In preparation for this enormously edifying film, I watched “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977) for the third time, and its timely forecasting of “Disclosure Day” out of the inimitable imagination of director Steven Spielberg. This visitation held and focused my mind on the musical score composed by John Williams; its five-note musical motif was the communication tool used to speak with the alien tourists. Again, Spielberg and Williams after thirty years, compose a score that is the backbone of the film, alluring in subtlety, reverence, potency; portends and pulsates with notes of poignancy haunting with the past, hinting of an understanding future. Scores of sophistications, elegance and power.
“Disclosure Day” wallops with actors Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo. Never have I given the praise due to Emily Blunt until now, her pellucid, miraculous, transformative performance as “Margaret Fairchild”, a flighty, pretty “weather woman”, mistress of multiple “tongues”; O’Connor, “Daniel Kellner” grasps the intricacies of the mathematical wunderkind and needs to reveal damaging records of government duplicity; Firth is remarkable as a likeable, righteous villain, “Noah Scanlon”; Hewson “Jane Blankenship” as an ex-novitiate is a metaphor for “Genesis” and Catholicism; Domingo, with a voice “of the gods” hits all the correct notes as “Hugo Wakefield”, a voice of reason.
The power of “Disclosure Day” comes from its atmosphere of confusion and government secrecy. Margaret and Daniel represent a new understanding—one that rejects fear of the “other” and embraces a return to a more empathetic, nurtured world.
FOUR & ½ STARS
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