Purpose represents the heart-warming story of homeboys made good. It’s an American movie, which is to say the cast and setting are American, though I suppose the themes are international, made primarily by two South Africans. Producer and co-scriptwriter Ronnie Apteker was involved in an Internet company that made him a lot of money, and probably gave him some grey hairs as well. The director is Alan Ari Lazar, who has acquired or rediscovered a middle name since his days as Mango Groove’s keyboardist and co-composer.
The movie, set in the Bay Area’s Silicon Valley, doubtless drawing on Apteker’s own experience, is the story of the rise and fall of a dotcom company during the feverish boom of recent years. John Elias (John Light) is the visionary who develops a brilliant new Internet idea; Robert Jennings (Jeffrey Donovan) is the classmate who does the numbers and pushes the fledgling company into a new realm of investment and financial chicanery. The trajectory of the tale covers the movement from wide-eyed innocence to bitter disillusionment, which I hope doesn’t give too much away — then again, given what we know of the milieu, that should hardly surprise.
In his quest to realise his vision, Elias has to call on the help of a couple of eccentrics, his teacher (Paul Reiser), who is given to some odd stunts in a light plane, and a growly old investor (Hal Holbrook), who has a thing for bucking broncos. This all feels quite plausible; California is, after all, known for its fruits and nuts, and there’s no reason some of those fruits or nuts shouldn’t be movers and shakers too. Also getting on the bandwagon, in her own inimitable way, is an investor played with icy control by Mia Farrow. Oddly, Farrow doesn’t seem to be doing anything different here than she did in many a Woody Allen movies, yet the character comes across as entirely unlike the somewhat scattily charming figures she used to embody.
Purpose is a morality tale, one about innocence and corruption, and the dangers of believing your own hype. It’s about how commercial interests are inherently inimical to truly original inventions, especially in a world in which illusion counts for more than reality. Elias learns his lessons the hard way. The moral centres of the story, the people who hold firm, while others are colluding with Elias’s own loss of a sense of purpose, are his girlfriend, Lisa (Megan Dodds) and a pair of Elias’s fellow software developers.
Lisa is the character who brings personal integrity to John Elias’s professional meltdown, though here things get a bit moralistic in a way that seems too much like a form of conventional shorthand. Lisa does seem a little too goody-goody, and the fact that she’s a folky confessional type of musician seems intended to give her a kind of moral superiority from the start. This has to be a personal thing, because nobody’s going to argue that the music industry is inherently more virtuous than the world of dotcom companies, are they?
The film’s performances are good, particularly those of Light and Donovan. Donovan is excellent — likeable, seductive, detestable. (And he has one superb, almost subliminal, moment with Farrow, that says more about his and her characters and their relation than many a page of script.) In general, Purpose moves along confidently, holds one’s attention, and delivers a satisfying ending. Let’s hope, though, that things weren’t quite so nasty for Apteker in the real world.