Kritiken

One of the film's most delightful elements is that each person closely identifies with a different French cinema star... An angry René, just about to lose his cool, cuts to a raving Jean Gabin. Sometimes when we can't express our emotions it's best to leave it to our cinematic alter-egos—they can handle life so much more artfully.

The genius of the film is that even without Laborit and his rats, "Mon oncle d'Amerique" would tell an entertaining story on its own. The characters are sympathetic (given what we know about them), the narrative is well-constructed, and we care.

While the quasi-determinist theories of Laborit (who occasionally appears on-screen to lecture us in a white lab coat) are never very interesting or persuasive, the film can never really be reduced to them. What matters here is the fluidity of Resnais and screenwriter Jean Gruault's masterful storytelling; they manage to convey a dense, multilayered narrative with remarkable ease and simplicity.

Shortsighted critics seem to imagine that the fictional material merely illustrates what Laborit says, although Resnais inserts some jokey shots of 'human' mice to demolish any such notions. His triumph is to create a new kind of fiction: a drama that not only leaves room to think, but opens up fissures that thoughts flood into, some prompted by Laborit, others by personal reflections, yet others by dreams. Inevitably, it ends in a riddle, and one which proves that surrealism lives.