In the dramatic feature, I’m Beginning to See the Light, director/co-writer Konstantin Khudyakov tells the story of once-famous jazz trumpeter Ezra Cooper (Jack Huston), who suffers a terrible tragedy just as his career seems to be on the cusp of a rebound. After his wife and daughter are killed in a car accident that he barely survives, Ezra learns that the object that crushed their car was a lens for a lighthouse.
When he leaves the hospital, he walks to the same lighthouse in his bloody clothes, still wounded. Climbing to the top, he considers ending his own life but is interrupted by a worker mistaking him for the owner. He informs Ezra that a replacement lens has been installed. Ezra spends the night at the lighthouse, seeming to have no other motivation. He is awakened by a delivery person named Cheryl (Lucy Punch), who tells him the previous lighthouse keeper has gone, and she assumes he’s the new guy. Upon witnessing the police taping off a dead body on the beach near the lighthouse, he learns that the lighthouse is a magnet for people who come to jump to their deaths. After a dark moment back at home, he finds he can’t face the place without his family and returns to the lighthouse.
Soon, Ezra is talking to another would-be suicide off the platform and helps him past the crisis to a sense of equilibrium. He shares a drink with a man named Sam (Brandon T. Jackson) and finds within his own grief a talent for helping others through theirs. In his next encounter, he tries to stop an agitated prison escapee (Mark Boone Junior) from breaking into the lighthouse, presumably also intent on jumping. The man attacks him, but Sam arrives in time to help subdue the escapee, and they turn him over to the police.
“…his wife and daughter are killed in a car accident that he barely survives,..”
In a less violent moment, a teacher named Hannah (Abbie Cornish) shows up with her class for a scheduled tour of the lighthouse. Sam takes them up while Ezra hangs back, talking to a student who shows interest in his trumpet. Sam and Hannah hit it off, and a small group of friends is formed between the three of them. Ezra and Hannah connect about music and life. With the help of his music, friendship, and tenuous beginnings of connections with people around him, slowly but surely, Ezra finds there may be purpose. His challenges are far from over, but he sees possibilities in facing life with grace and gratitude despite the harsh realities.
Khudyakov cushions the darkness of the tale with beautiful jazz and glorious vistas. Maz Makhani’s cinematography artfully employs light as an active participant in the film. He paints the images in contrasts of color and darkness, fog and clarity, in and out of focus. The visuals are masterfully undertaken. Huston brings Ezra to life with compassion and humor. Mark Boone Junior, well known for his role in Sons of Anarchy, delivers the disturbed prison escapee with manic power, preaching like a mad prophet. The performances across the board are authentic and raw.
I’m Beginning to See the Light is not a typical romantic redemption narrative that eschews the saccharine superficiality of loss’s dark complexity. It’s a deeper experience, and just how far down it goes isn’t clear until the end. The lighthouse is a multi-layered metaphor: a warning of dangerous rocks near the shore but also a light shining for the lost to find their way home.
"…the dark complexity of loss and the beginning of recovery..."
