how does Mary give a performance like this." In her attempts to communicate with a god that we're never given any reassuring signs of, she embodies the remarkably painful yearning which sustains the film's emotional core, and which generates a kind of moral reawakening in the Ryan character. As someone who's interested in the presentational, physical, and material qualities of cinema, I'm usually one to shy away from overtly transcendental readings in art, and yet I find her performance, combined with Ray's filming of it, so convincing that I'm inclined to call this one of the only films I've seen that successfully attempts to document the vagaries of the human spirit.