Loving Through Understanding and Finding Peace in Peace, Love & Misunderstanding - Essay Example

Loving Through Understanding and Finding Peace in Peace, Love & Misunderstanding Because of people’s differences, they can find it hard to understand and accept one another, more so, to love each another unconditionally. Peace, Love & Misunderstanding, directed by Bruce Beresford, and shown in theaters in 2011, explores the misunderstandings within one family. After Mark (Kyle MacLachlan) asks for a divorce, Diane (Catherine Keener) decides to stay for a weekend at Grace’s (Jane Fonda) house. Diane brings her children, Zoe (Elizabeth Olsen) and Jake (Nat Wolff) with her. Diane surprises her mother, whom she has alienated for twenty years. What is supposed to be a weekend, where Diane only wanted space from her husband and their divorce, became a full week of awakening for all characters. Diane resolves her conflicts her with her children, her mother, and with herself, by understanding that they are all human beings, and by accepting that they all have weaknesses, she can stop judging them and herself and begin loving with peace. Diane is detached from her children, which creates a barrier between them, because she misunderstands their maturity and needs. When she brings them to her mother’s house, her children are asking about the reasons. Jake even jokes that their grandmother is dead, since they have not seen her since birth and suddenly they have to meet her. Diane finally drops the bad news that she and Mark are having a divorce. Zoe wants to talk about it, but Diane does not say anything anymore. When Zoe asks, “Are we going to talk about this,” Diane does not answer and prepares to go in the house. With her back on Zoe, the scene indicates detachment from her children’s concerns. Instead of being open to her children, Diane creates a wall between them without even being aware of it. As a result, Zoe and Jake hardly understand what their mother is going through, because they do not even know who she is. The conflict between Diane and her kids arises from her treatment of them as children, instead of as adolescents who are already mature enough to know the truth and to know how to cope with their family issues. The irony is that she is doing to her kids, what her mother did to her- to separate herself from her children because of the feeling that they cannot understand their parent’s concerns and needs. Aside from conflict with her children, Diane has a longstanding conflict with her mother because she does not want to understand her for who she is and not what Diane wants her to be. In her mind, her mother is a poor parent because she smokes pot and sells it, which is illegal. At the same time, Diane remembers the days that her mother was not able to pick her up from school on time because she is wasted or with her lovers. She cannot let go of her mother’s “irresponsibility, embarrassment and total refusal to grow up” (Peace, Love & Misunderstanding). Her mother, on the other hand, continues with her carefree hippie life. She wants to make amends with her daughter for the sake of her relationship and for the sake of being with her grandchildren, but as Jude describes Diane, the latter cannot stop her fighting as she “[boxes] with shadows” (Peace, Love & Misunderstanding). Diane does not realize yet that all she does in her life is to fight, even when people are not fighting with her. All she knows is that she and her mother are in conflict because they have different values and priorities in life. Diane has yet to open her mind to the real reason behind their conflict- her inability to fully accept her mother, especially her human faults and limitations and their differences as human beings. Apart from conflict with her family, the greatest conflict Diane has is with her own self because she has not accepted the fullness of her humanity. She misunderstands people because she misunderstands her identity most of all. Because of her mother’s free spirit, whom Diane learned to loathe, she decided to be more responsible and aggressive. She does not know how to have fun and appreciate life’s simple sources of happiness. An example is her displaced anger at her mother’s chickens. These chickens are free and have no troubles in the world. Diane does not want to be like that. She wants to know her roles and goals in life and to feel responsible for them. When something goes wrong, Diane blames herself. She does not want to accept that as a human being, she has flaws too. For instance, when Jude kisses her onstage, and then after that Zoe goes home late, Diane feels that she has something to explain to Zoe because she made a mistake in kissing Jude back. In reality, just as Grace explained to Zoe, the latter only has to understand that people grow and change all the time: “Sometimes in art, like in life, you have to accept the fact that your things aren't going right, and you don't quite know where you're going, and you have to accept that. Because that's when transformation can happen” (Peace, Love & Misunderstanding). This advice goes for Diane too. She resists accepting that she cannot control everything in her life. As long as Diane has this thinking that life is all about control and winning arguments, she cannot transform from a bitter woman to a happy human being. In order to resolve these conflicts, Diane develops understanding and acceptance for her family’s differences and weaknesses, as well as her own. Her transformation begins with her actions first, such as when she takes off her sandals and loosens her jacket to spend time with Jude, as well as jumping into the lake semi-nude. She does not know it yet, but she is changing from the inside. She is opening up to taking risks and not judging herself in the process. Furthermore, Diane becomes less guarded with her children. For instance, she allows Jake to go to Tara’s house. She stops worrying about her children because she accepts them as adult enough to make the right decisions and to learn from their mistakes. Moreover, Diane lets go of her angst with her mother. Following Jude’s advice, she lets go of the sandbag, so that the balloon can take off the ground. The sandbag contains her anger and impatience. When she releases it, she accepts that her mother is not perfect, but she is her mother and she loves her. Most of all, Grace loves her so much too. She is not always perfect as a mother, but her love for her daughter is so deep, and that makes her love perfect. Finally, Diane changes her angry attitude to life. One of her strengths is that she loves her family so much, and she uses that as her inspiration to transform and to become a better person. Instead of fighting with herself to be a perfect person, she fights to be a better person through being open-minded and less guarded of her emotions. Diane soon understands that the problem is her misguided thinking about the quality of life as being based on being right and having power over others, and she resolves it by accepting everyone’s strengths and weaknesses because they are all human beings who love and want to be loved back. People cannot fully love when they are full of anger and judgment. Diane misunderstands her conflicts with her family because she judges them as falling short of her expectations. The true misunderstanding hails from her inner struggles with herself. She struggles for perfection because she wants to be different from her mother. She fights because her mother loves peace too much. Throughout her stay at Woodstock, Diane changes because realizes that she is not perfect, and so are her loved ones. But their love for one another is perfect and this gives her peace. Graces says: “Exclusion is an unnecessary violence, don't you think?” People exclude others in their lives because they misjudge them. But the worst exclusion is exclusion of one’s wholeness. Diane stops excluding her whole humanity, by accepting her weaknesses, as well as others, and from there, peace of mind reigns, and love simply flows. Work Cited Peace, Love & Misunderstanding. Dir. Bruce Beresford. Perf. Jane Fonda, Catherine Keener, Nat Wolff, and Elizabeth Olsen. BCDF Pictures, 2011. Film. Read More