Wittgenstein film review

This is certainly a shockingly playful biopic about one of the 20th century most intellectual, and fabulously gay, philosophers. Derek Jarman is able to captivate the audience throughout Wittgenstein’s journey to discover a true success.

 The film, 'Wittgenstein', is unbelievable. Whether unbelievable is seen as a positive description or a negative one, is up to you.

 The 70minutes production, which included theatrical elements, explores Wittgenstein's idea, the 'Language Game', a well-known principle which has been implicated and still used in the classroom today. Unfortunately, the philosopher’s theory came at a cost, as years of discovery and research into a whole ‘new world’ led to a series of mental issues developed later in his life.

The audience are able to follow his reasons and logic behind his theory. This gave the audience a lot to think about; though it is complicated to get through at first, it is certainly interesting once you get the hang of it.

Wittgenstein tried to solve all of philosophy's problems. He dismissed the idea that language is one way or another separate and equivalent to reality and argued that without understanding the concept of something, you opinions and definitions are meaningless.

Jarman portrays a very thin line from genius to absolute lunacy. The film is a direct echo of Wittgenstein’s personality. In some ways, the philosopher reminds me of the overly intellectual Physician, Sheldon Cooper, from the ‘Big Bang Theory’.

 

The performance has been praised and considered “remarkable” by his biographer, Ray Monk.

Personally, the film failed to provide me with a useful insight into one of the greatest philosophers and his theory of Language Games. Although, his revolutionary ideas affect disciplines as diverse as philosophy of mind, psychology, the natural sciences, linguistics, mathematics, logic and the arts, there were certain scenes I completely lost track in what was going on.

Don’t get me wrong, Jarman’s show on Wittgenstein is perfect in terms of understanding his childhood and adulthood as the writer seemed too focused on his psychological issues as oppose to his philosophical ideas. Even so, the film was performed by the characters superbly, which is good enough for me.

Bravo.