SnoopyStyle
Edna (Ellen Burstyn) experiences the afterlife after a deadly car crash that killed her husband. She's paralysed and returns to her family in rural Kansas. There she finds she has an ability to heal and other supernatural powers. She's lauded for her healing powers. She's hounded by Cal (Sam Shepard) and she falls for him. Cal's father is a firebrand who accuses her the work of the devil. Edna's father calls her trash and whore, and kicks her out. But the biggest blow may come from Cal.Ellen Burstyn is the master of her craft. She embraces this character without any limitations. I wish she had one guy in her life who isn't batcrap crazy. Her character is more compelling than the story. The story meanders as she deals with one crazy outburst after another. The religious tone is interesting but maybe upsetting to some. More balance with a lead character who isn't crazy would help.
jjnxn-1
Amazingly well acted film with Ellen Burstyn giving what could be a career best performance. Part of the power of her performance and the film is that she portrays a very normal woman thrust by circumstance into an extraordinary situation. Her Edna is presented in small touches with a few chances to dazzle us thrown in. Usually when one performer is so strong the rest of the cast tends to be overshadowed, such is not the case here. Lois Smith, Roberts Blossom, Richard Farnsworth and Sam Shepard all create wonderfully realized characters but the absolute scene stealer is Eva Le Galliene as the grandmother. A legend of the Broadway stage it is a pity she did not start working in film regularly until old age. Her rendering of an old farm woman is a thing of beauty in the realness and truth she brings to her. Her interactions with Ellen Burstyn are lovely and heartbreaking. The story of being touched with special powers after a brush with death is intriguing but would be unmemorable without this cast who make it so compelling. The ending is perfect. Highly recommended.
sol
***SPOILERS*** Surviving a deadly car crash where her husband Joe, Jeffrey DeMunn, was killed Mae McCaule,Ellen Burstyn, momentarily was declared dead in the hospital emergency room when all her vital functions flat-lined but then almost miraculously came back to life! It was later in the movie that Mae began to realize that not only was she given a second chance to live but was also a gift that in the end would almost cause her to die again at the hands of her crazed and bible thumping lover who's life she saved with that very gift that she received from beyond.It took a while for Mae to get her life back together again in her recuperation from the car crash that not only took the life of her husband Joe but also left her an invalid not able to walk. An incident earlier in the movie, after she came back to life in the hospital emergency room, in Mae's encounter with old man Esco Brown, Richard Farnsworth, on her way to Kansas to live with her father John, Robert Blossom, and Grandma Pearl, Eve Le Gallienne, may have had a far more greater impact on her life, besides Esco filling her gas tank with gaoling, then she at first thought. Esco a strange but friendly and personable sort of guy put Mae at ease in the stress that she at that time was going through. Later in the movie, when you had almost forgot about the old guy, we see that Mae in fact realized what he did for her in Mae herself doing somewhat the same thing, for a very sick and terminally ill little boy, that was completely overlooked in her initial encounter with Esco.I took a while for Mae to realize what the gift that she received from the result of her car accident was. It wasn't until she was able to cure herself of her paralysis that things started to really get a bit edgy with the people in and around town whom she lived with. You would think that curing the incurable would have made those who knew her as well as those like her boyfriend Carl Carpenter,Sam Shaperd, that Mae cured appreciate what she did for them. Instead a number of people that included Carl and his fire and brimstone bible thumping father Earl, Richard Hamilton, took Mae's kind unselfish and God-given abilities as being that of the Devil himself who was using Mae for his own evil purposes.The more proof, including controlled laboratory tests with ill and crippled persons, confirming Mae's miraculous powers being genuine came out the more both Earl and his by now very unstable son Carl began to suspect, with Mae not reciting any passages from the bible in her curing sessions, that the Devil had a hand in them. Which finally lead to Carl, now completely out of his cotton-picking skull, crashing a healing seminar headed by Mae where she almost got killed by the wild and crazy motorcycle riding and gun toting religious lunatic.Mae coming to the realization that whatever powers that she has are to be kept as much under the radar screen, or away from the public, as possible is now as the film ends, what seems like ten years later, running the same gas station/general store that the late Esco Brown did. Mae in effect is doing ,besides pumping gas and selling cold drinks and hard candies, what he was doing earlier in the movie in helping those who desperately needed his help without them really knowing about it. Mea is preforming miracles in that out of the way outpost in the middle of the vast and empty Arizona/Nevada Desert that may well be, to those who visit it, in the deepest recesses of one's mind as well as at the same time on the outer most fringes of what we conceive to be human reality. In that in between dimension of what's real and whats imaginary known to all of us as the "Twilight Zone".
bluecoronet77
Resurrection is an excellent film made over 25 years ago and it still holds up very well. Ellen Burstyn was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for the film. It is a surprising film in that you think you know where it is going, but you really do not know. It strongly deserves a new life on DVD.Contrary to what the trivia section states about this film, Ellen Burstyn was not pitched the script of Resurrection. In an interview with Burstyn by Blaise DiStefano, Burstyn states: "You know, Resurrection was a story that I had commissioned to be written, and it was inspired from the reading I was doing at the time on the re-emergence of the goddess and bringing the feminine into a religious figure."
