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DIRECTED BY: Michael Miner
REVIEWED: 03-29-99 (The Austin Chronicle)
Pale and luminescent, Mary basks in light, absorbs it, reflects it, generates it. Penny, hard and glittery, winces in its bright glare, her harsh angles refract it, distort it, shatter it into a thousand brittle shards. This tale of two orphaned sisters, the younger stricken with illness, the older diseased with grief and responsibility and loss, is a dance in several movements, and light is its constant partner. Beautifully shot and exquisitely performed, The Book of Stars is an exploration of the evanescence of life and the indelibility of love. Jena Malone's Mary is positively incandescent, her presence a radiant gift. Mary's illness and isolation has imbued her with precocious wisdom and uninhibited naïveté. The edges of her grim reality are softened with a dreamy optimism for both the yesterdays and the tomorrows she depicts in the scrapbook of the film's title. Penny, played with fragile defiance by Masterson, has a gentle and poetic core but sharp and hardened edges. Her darkness harbors nightmares that daylight cannot threaten. Unfortunately, the sisters' moments of shining fancy and rushes of dark despair are muddied by emotional detritus. The professor's tiresome lectures, the Hungarian refugee's stunning but superfluous visions, and beautiful but indulgent shots impede the course of The Book of Stars. Its arrow still finds the heart, but somehow it feels like overkill.
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