My seventh grade teacher tacked up a Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure poster to our classroom corkboard - much to my prepubescent dismay. She did not know the difference between what was excellent (Iron Maiden) and what was bogus ("Execute them")! She did not play air guitar or thinks Bill's mom was hot! And I hope to God she didn't know why the number they mentally chose to test the future (or past) Bill and Ted was sixty nine.

Turns out the poster was there because - damned if I learned anything - the adventure was not only excellent, but educational. Seems we learned about some historical figures in the process of being entertained - awesomely.

So we young, impressionable, burgeoning youths struggling to define ourselves as moronic valley folk, were bamboozled by the film's writers Ed Solomon (Men In Black) and Chris Matheson.

Ed Solomon resurfaces with Levity, this time as a writer/director, making an uncharacteristic attempt at a somber drama (though he never fully shakes his affinity for surrealism and comedy even in the grimness of this particular tale). Mr. Solomon told me that he discovered the story somewhere in his psyche – it was a story that kept coming back to him.

Gravity is the natural force that pulls objects to the ground - Levity is its impossible opposite - at least here on Earth.

Levity the film focuses on a released murderer (Billy Bob Thornton sporting a white mane) after thirty years in prison as he wanders the snow-ridden streets on a quest for redemption or some form of closure - and he is compelled to consider that perhaps true salvation is, like levity the principal, impossible. Once you cross some invisible, metaphysical line you are not allowed to come back down.

Thornton appears guided on his journey by some higher power (he is thrown into the "story" after answering a ringing payphone), like Ulysses on his odyssey, encountering obstacles and colorful, not entirely realistic relationships along the way. A scripture preaching mentor (Morgan Freeman) who owns a club where rich kids get cracked on psychedelic drugs. A young party girl (Kirsten Dunst) throwing her life away, in need of saving. A sensitive souled single mom (Holly Hunter) dealing with a gang banger son and who also happens to be the sister of the victim of Thornton's thirty year old crime.

Are these actual people or representations concocted by Solomon to connect with Thornton and elicit lessons about his condition? To put it simply: In a movie so evidently personal and purposeful for Solomon, it is under-whelming to find that one doesn't know exactly why things are happening. Pieces fall into place without explanation or apparent explanation. Solomon explains that he is aware that the film “does not have a typical three act structure and it doesn’t have an antagonist and it doesn’t resolve all things neat and tidy. It takes place in universe that is a little more subjective.”

The truly difficult question audiences will be poring over is whether Ed Solomon has created a film as shallow as the seventh grader's version of Bill and Ted's or as deep and profound as the seventh grade teacher's perception of the same film.

Levity rides a fine line - dipping in and out of dark psychological caverns, weaving between sincere character studies and throwaway stereotypes, and coasting on second-hand intellectualism, obscure symbolism, and as good as to be expected performances by some of the most talented actors working.

Levity's complications, however, do not stick in your throat - they slumber in your stomach. It is the kind of film you may see late at night and when you wake up the next morning, you can't remember whether you watched a strange movie the night before or had a convoluted dream starring Kirsten Dunst (known to happen). The initial impact that other recent indie thinking-man's movies like In the Bedroom or to a lesser degree The Deep End possess - Levity is lacking. Levity takes its relevance in stride - almost as if the stellar cast, successful writer, and serious themes would carry the day - despite a monotonous plot that leaves everyone and everything…

But of course that could be the whole point - that we only fool ourselves trying to find meaning, trying to gain atonement; Solomon's existential, transcendent message that religion and philosophy professors all around the globe are going to pick up on and then encourage their students to pack into small art-house theaters in New York, San Francisco, and Denver to better understand the bleakness of an irremediably tainted life and the raging, bubbling, hurtling comet of shame and disgust and desire to be and do good rocketing from brains to hearts to spirits - and then floating up, like Solomon's symbolic snowball, penetrating the heavens where we find God who is the penultimate purveyor of forgiveness.

Then again - in the back of my mind I hear the cautioning words of Ted Theodore Logan and Bill S. Preston, Esq., "Sixty Niiiine, Duuude." 

Q & A with Ed Solomon

Q: I asked Solomon about Thornton’s character’s reference to an unidentified 12th century writer who’s five levels to redemption sounded a lot like The Rambam’s (Maimonides) introduction to Hilchot Teshuvah?

A: That actually is Maimonides. I wanted the character to represent remorse and redemption and so I asked a friend of mine – actually a rabbi – Rabbi Naomi Levy from Los Angeles – I asked her what could this guy have been reading in prison for thirty years if he was interested in studying redemption. And she suggested Maimonides and his five levels to redemption. So we did take it from him – Maimonides’ people are still after us for a writing credit. But you know what? You are the first person to ask me about that…you’re the first to pick up on that.

I think Holly Hunter was impressed. Go HAFTR!