I was really looking forward to this, since I love Jones and Jackson and McCarthy. I enjoy Shakespeare and philosophy and movies like _My Dinner with Andre_ and _Mindwalk_.

Alas, this movie left me feeling unsatisfied and annoyed. I'll admit right away that I don't have any sympathy for the humdrum bleak existentialist reasoning expressed by White in this movie. If (as he says) the hope of human civilization was extinguished in the gas chambers of Dachau, then it was resurrected in the revolt of Treblinka. If the horrors of the human slave trade and the Middle Passage obliterates the nobility of our species, then Harriet Tubman reorients us to the possibility of ourselves and shows us the true face of prophecy.

Joseph Asagai answers White's pessimism in _A Raisin in the Sun_ by dismissing the notion that he and others like him are "realists". Trapped in a cycle of limited vision and despair, they refuse to see the good and progress of humanity as any kind of counterbalance to the evil, and yet they get to pretend that theirs is the one true honest understanding of who we are. Piffle! With blind Christian faith as the only response to White's solipsistic nihilism, we have a very articulate and entertaining straw man. Throughout the movie I kept imagining worthwhile responses to White's claims, and felt thoroughly discouraged by the inadequacy of Black's dialogue.

I'm glad I saw this movie, but I cannot go along with the glowing perfect-score reviews dished out by my esteemed colleagues on this forum.

This is a good film, with great acting, provided you don't think it's going to be an atheist/theist discussion film. I see many people think that, but that's not what this really is about.

The atheist is suicidal, so he isn't representing a typical scientific, optimistic outlook on life as we have grown accustomed to from argumentative professors lately. In fact, most atheists will feel quite uneasy with many of his arguments.

To him, everything is futile. You need to see this in the context of the post WW2 era, since he's very much caught up in the holocaust which to him made everything pointless. This is interesting, but in a sense, this is also the film's weakness, that I get the feeling that they have made a film out of a 50 year old drama.(I haven't found out when it was written but it doesn't seem like it was staged before after 2000) You should think that this is a timeless subject, but things have changed.

While the preacher, being a lay preacher with a prison background, uses 50 year old arguments, this is not so uncommon for this type. However, in the beginning, I got annoyed when the professor couldn't counter these fairly simple arguments. This may have been the whole point, that the professor was a bit out of it. However, in the end, the professor completely rips through the preacher's arguments as he unleashes all his inner darkness.

His depression and bleak outlook of life is what makes the film good. Don't expect to find good arguments for a happy godless life, because there aren't anyone in this movie.