- Steve Almond 

“Or consider what Hughes does with a visit by our heroes to the Art Institute of Chicago. Backed by a soft, symphonic score, he offers us lengthy shots of the most beautiful paintings in the world: Hoppers, Modiglianis, Pollocks. There is no ulterior plot motive; he is simply celebrating the majesty of the work. We see Cameron, Ferris, and his dishy girlfriend Sloane stand before a trio of Picassos, transfixed.

As the music crescendoes, we see Cameron standing before Georges Seurat’s pointillist masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. We cut to a shot of Ferris and Sloane, the happy couple, necking in the blue light of a stained-glass window, then back to Cameron, alone, staring at the Seurat. Another one of these magical things happens: the camera begins zooming in on the little girl in white at the center of the canvas. We cut back to Cameron, closer now. Then back to the little girl. We see his growing anguish as he realizes that her mouth is wide open, that, in fact, she is wailing.

Okay, good enough: Cameron recognizes himself in the figure of this little girl whose mother is holding her hand but making no effort to comfort her. Got it.

But then Hughes takes us even deeper. He gives us an extreme close-up of Cameron’s eyes, then cuts back to the canvas, to the girl’s face, then to her mouth, then to the specks of paint that make up her mouth, until we can no longer resolve those specks into an image; they are just splotches of color on coarse fabric. This is the true nature of Cameron’s struggle: his anxieties have obliterated his sense of identity.”