White Palms

Like my sis, I too was disappointed with this film. It looks beautiful and the actors' performances are solid but significant parts of the story are missing. I expected to see a lot more of the friendship/rivalry between the main character and the Canadian gymnast (Zoltan Miklos Hajdu in the role of Miklos Dongo, and Kyle Shewfelt in the role of Kyle Manjak).

The hardship of Miklos' training as a young boy is quite heart-breaking and it's easy to see why he runs away with the circus (literally). But the part of the story with Miklos as a gymnastics coach in Calgary is the most interesting and it doesn't get nearly enough screen time. When the film jumps to Miklos and Kyle competing together at the 2002 World Championships, it's a surprise because the viewer really has no context or knowledge of the competitive history or status of Miklos' character. Although I want to understand Miklos saying it's his "last chance to prove I'm a real gymnast," the flashback part of the story hasn't yet shown why he should feel that way.

During the competition sequence, the film masterfully cuts back and forth between time periods, creating great drama and tension. Overlapping the climax of both storylines, however, doesn't allow the viewer to incorporate and appreciate the signifiance of the past events in relation to the earlier parts of the movie.

The film does briefly show the great comraderie that can exist between competitors in sports like gymnastics - where the competition is really against yourself. But this is only hinted at, and could be a bigger part of the story.

The final sequence of Miklos' later life is fascinating and breath-taking (again briefly), but it doesn't feel like a conclusion - mostly because there wasn't much story arc to conclude. I really wanted to love it, and I certainly didn't hate it, but it fell quite short of my expectations.

White Palms

Not really what I was expecting based on other reviews. This film was short on a lot of things - including dialogue, continuity, and strangely enough, gymnastics footage. While the story was billed as the journey of a male gymnast from eastern Europe in the Communist era coming to Canada for a role as a coach, the threads quickly get lost in the early prolonged flashback to the not-so-nice place where he grew up. And the story never really comes back together after that. While the present and the past are revealed almost in parallel, the intercutting often does not make sense, and a substantial gap remains in the story - there is a 16-year period in his life that never really gets explained, and so the story remains unfulfilling. The film does have a few things going for it, including a great scene where the past mixed with the present makes for some edge-of-the-seat minutes, and the film's star makes for some wonderful eye candy. However, it never gets around to telling the entire story, and ends up feeling incomplete. The appearance of the Canadian gymnast is actually a bit of a distraction for me, mostly because I was hoping to see some excellent gymnastics routines but was disappointed. Some sports movies tend to show too much of the sport and competition, but this one showed too little to be satisfying, especially when the story and visual elements of the film were also lacking.