--and drowning! What a go-nowhere movie this was--waiting and waiting to even figure out minorly what it was about, and even then at about halfway through it still offered absolutely nothing. The best part was the going blind guy listening to opera and trying to paint with his eyes closed. The sicko relationship of the kid with his half naked seductive mother and her scarf bits which led to his fetish with the scarf on the woman he decided to stalk with the camera? and then she, a professional doctor, decides to just go ahead and seduce him and ask him to spank her hard and call her a bad mommy??!! You have got to be kidding. And THIS? is "award-winning"?? Pul-eeze. Don't waste your time like I did.

Beautiful story, a bit predictable but the acting was spot on, a well thought out narrative.

I adored this movie. It was beautiful visually and musically. A unique perspective to capture love, loss, and growth. It wasn't slow at all, it moved at the pace needed to tell this beautiful story.

But I didn't. It seems the whole movie is adrift in dis-connected silence. Talk about some sleepy stuff. I made 37 minutes of it before I died.

I really got a lot out of this movie and from reading the insightful and diverse comments of the viewers who came before me. Among the threads I picked up on from what the movie had to say and what all of you had to say about it, probably the most poignant for me are: vision -- what one is able to see and where his/her blindspots are; perspective -- how one's unique point-of-view influences his/her outlook on Life, and; the space-time continuum and how one relates to it both philosophically and functionally -- whether one's tendency is to live spontaneously in the present, to dwell in the unchangeable past, to live in fear and resistance about the unforeseeable future, or merely exist "adrift" in the world, internally and/or externally unanchored to oneself and to others? Each character in this film has his or her own perspective on the meaning (or lack thereof) of the parenthesis which is his or her Life with their lived experience being wholly dependent upon the character's temporal vantage point: some are living in the moment like the secretary who just wants to be loved and to love in return as do her grandchildren by virtue of the fact that they are not burdened by emotional baggage from their past; others such as Rose, her estranged husband and Simon's mother aren't really living so much as surviving in the present because they are bound to their past by loss, grief and despair about what once was rather than what is now and what is yet to come; the older gentleman is already blind in a figurative sense in that he can not envision in his mind's eye how to go on living without his eyesight, and; Simon lives through his camera, adrift from everyone and everything save what he sees from afar through a telescopic lens. I saw this film as a "snapshot" of life, like one of Simon's spontaneous photos...what e e cummings described as a "parenthesis" (or a "timeout" as one of the poetry students put it) in the poem discussed in Billy Baldwin's class. Therefore, I did not find the film's lack of a neat and tidy ending anti-climactic in the least; instead, I found it refreshing, lifelike and consistent with the tone and theme of the film. As the saying goes, "a picture is worth a thousand words" so I think it is up to each viewer to add his or her own "caption" to it!