"I hate you...".
Remember the father in the basement?
"I hate you..."
Deliberate logical equivalence. Very cool.
Yes! That is what makes this movie so good, and work so well; everything leads to the next thing, and everything comes together seamlessly. Some people I saw the movie with thought parts of it were boring, but I think they just don't have the patience to recognize how important it was to the resolution of the film that all these seemingly small things be set up into place. Must be a modern American attention span thing.
Seamlessly. There's the word I was looking for, exactly.
I should probably here admit that I am currently "dating" a Pagan. (It ain't "serious", so to speak, but a Young Man like myself has to have a pretty girl on his arm when he goes to see a movie, right??).
She asked me, "What's the deal about this guy 'regaining his faith'? Why did he 'regain his faith' at the end... why not when his son killed the angry dog with the garden-fork? Why didn't he 'regain his faith' then?"
I told her, "Babe, the man had lost his Faith and believed only in coincidence. If you live on a FARM, a 'garden fork' might just be laying around when you need it... to our minds, that is just a 'coincidence'. But for a Man to come to the sudden realization that EVERYTHING -- your son's asthma, your daughter's water-obsession, your dying wife's prophetic foreknowledge -- that EVERYTHING is under the control of the Divine Governor... now THAT'S a spiritual catharsis. THAT is going to wake a man up."
She sorta nodded... thoughtfully, I hope... and went back to buying our Haagen-Dasz ice-cream treat for the night.
Anyway, it's like you said...seamless. There's the word.