A Home at the End of the World

Grade: C+

Earnest artificiality makes me sad. Fewer things are more frustrating than a film that is at once endearingly sweet and very well intentioned yet also superficial, manufactured and phony.

Nine times out of ten, it is a critical mistake for an author to adapt his own book into a screenplay. Michael Cunningham is one of the finest writers of our time. “The Hours” ranks as one of the greatest works of 20th Century literature, and even his lesser known “A Home At the End of the World” creates richly ambiguous characters that are neither simplistic nor obvious. There is great understatement and depth in his words on the page, yet here his screenplay reenacts moments and creates new situations that now feel forced and labored with heightened dialogue that is neither terribly moving nor appropriately convincing.

Three friends – one gay, one straight, one unclear – move through generations together as friends, lovers, caregivers and confidantes. Colin Farrell is surprisingly good as a man who needs to be needed and quietly adapts himself to fill the shoes others require of him. Trapped in a sort of adolescent stasis, there is a pained vacancy to his performance that suggests he will never completely find what he is looking for, because he has never truly been afforded the opportunity or ability to grow into whatever that may be. Unfortunately, he nearly blows his fellow thespians off the screen, and Robin Wright Penn and Dallas Roberts don’t have the film presence or the dialogue to rise much beyond bittersweet caricature. The always great Sissy Spacek creates warm flesh and blood from cold lines and too little screen time, but the meaning and purpose of her character (mother and adopted mother to two of the triangle) is never made particularly clear or vital.

Clothes, props and really (really) bad wigs do not the decades make, and novice film director Michael Mayer (who has done some extraordinary work in the theatre) has failed to inhabit his environment with texture or reality. Every moment looks and feels like actors and extras wearing bell bottoms, tripping on acid, listening to Jefferson Airplane and driving Volkswagens on a soundstage somewhere. The settings of time and place feel as synthetic as the episodic situations and, as much as we may wish to embrace the characters and empathize with emotions of unrequited love, family loss, and emotional attachment, we never feel as connected to the characters as we are meant to believe they are to one another.

One has the sense that these are very real, multi-dimensional characters with genuine depth of feeling and heart. Sadly, they are wrapped in plastic.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0359423/

The Bourne Supremacy

Grade: C

{Note: This review contains some generalized plot device spoilers}

Clearly, none of the raving critics (raving as in 1: overabundant in their praise and 2: out of their loony tune minds) have ever seen an episode of “Alias,” which is far more sophisticated, intelligently written, and compelling than this tediously serious spy yawner. Oh, the acting is better, too.

I defy anyone to explain the plot to me. Who did what when, why did those who did it do it, how does this story interconnect with that story, who is this guy, that guy and the other guy and why does any of this matter in the first place?

It is to the great credit of major talent (and now beefcake) Matt Damon that we manage to identify with a character that is such a zephyr, someone who we never really get to know because he doesn’t even know himself – we’re talking amnesia here, not some deep psychological family trauma. Yet the story is so muddled and uninteresting, the camerawork and editing so never-endingly frenetic (the whirligigging images swirl in such close-up, quick cutting, camera shaking fragments one often can’t actually see what’s going on), and the spy clichés so abundant (bullets killing the target’s lover, tape recorders capturing confessions, energizer bunny cars that keep going and going and going no matter how many times they’ve been crashed into, enemy spies who just keep conveniently running into each other for no explicable reason) that one is bored instead of riveted. Amidst all the high tech bells, whistles and brooding atmosphere, one simply keeps waiting for the story to actually begin.

Abundant in intensity, drive and energy, moments of humor and lucidity are few and far between.

“Alias: The Complete Third Season” arrives in stores on September 7th. The cost of two movie tickets, a super-sized popcorn, Twizzlers and a giant soda should just about cover the cost of the DVDs.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0372183/

The Door In The Floor

Grade: B+


A little girl awakens her father in the middle of the night. “I heard a noise, Daddy,” she whimpers. When asked what it sounded like, the child opines, “It sounded like someone trying not to make a sound.”

If I had brought my note pad to the movie theater (yes, I confess I sometimes scribble down a note or two), I would most certainly have written the line down. Great line.

Moments later, the father, a writer and illustrator, is at his typewriter titling his next children’s book. “The Sound of Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound.”

Based on one section of John Irving’s “The Widow for One Year” – one of the greatest, most sprawling, oft cinematically bastardized storytellers of our time –
Screenwriter/Director Tod Williams knows great lines and beautiful moments when he sees them. And he knows how to keep them pure.

Surviving the immobilizing loss of one’s children makes for a plot that is sometimes reminiscent and occasionally derivative of other family dramas. We’ve been down some of this well trod path before, but Irving’s world is full of its own unconventional sensibilities and ambiguous truths. One is never served the realities of grief buried in blame, childhood perception and memory, adolescent idolatry and lust, or hypnotizing loss with simplistic or paint-by-number brush strokes. The lines between selfish need and loving sacrifice are to be drawn by the perceiver, and here are likely to be discussed in great detail once the lights come up. While never as devastating as one might hope, there is also nothing manipulative or stagey in the pathos either. The film also manages an oddly humorous tone, sometimes out of kilter with the overall melody and yet faithfully and quirkily Irvingesque.

Jeff Bridges (could he possibly be more underrated?) and Kim Basinger provide exceptionally honest and understated performances, and relative newcomer Jon Foster holds his own while literally sandwiched between such pros. Flashes of “Ordinary People” and “Unfaithful” may cross the mind, but Irving has his own story to tell, and Williams walks the fine line between the visual and the literary better than any other version of an Irving work – a scene where Bridges tells a story from his own life in the third person is but one of the film’s elegant and poetic moments. But how I long for a miniseries that can capture the sweep and depth of one of his 600 page worlds.

Not unlike a children’s book that casts a different glow on the reader once the child becomes an adult, the door in the floor is likely to represent something quite different to each person sitting in the theater.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0348593/

Before Sunset

Grade: A-

Some nine years ago, I trudged to a Blockbuster and made one of those “damn it to hell all the copies of the movie I want to see are out so now I have to settle for this marginally interesting looking thing I really have no grand desire to see” movie rentals.

“Before Sunrise” became my favorite film of the year.

Two twentysomething strangers, spending a day in Vienna together philosophizing about life, love, relationships, sex and, um, philosophy. Two people talking and getting to know each other for over 90 minutes on film, what a novel idea. I was enchanted. The sexual energy between Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy was palpable, the ending to it all painfully, movingly ambiguous. There was no question that two people could indeed fall in love during the course of just one day. I believed.

Nine years later, and the chemistry is only richer, the dialogue more crackling and sophisticated, and the spark more intense than before. No longer kids, these are now grownups living with the consequences of lives led, paths chosen, opportunities missed. If the dialogue sometimes comes to the precipice of pretentiousness, there is a maturity and weight to these people that never fails to carry the moment. As in a two character play – my favorite kind – much is communicated, uncovered and revealed in a very short wisp of time. Two long lost lovers, brought together via a publicity tour – he has written a book about one very passionate night of long ago. The film is told in real time, a scant 80 minutes, in the merest blink of an eye. Set against the charmed backdrop of Paris, their conversation is honest, subtle, adult, and eminently romantic, with an ending that is simple perfection. I was moved long after leaving the theatre.

This is a film that had me snuggling way down into my seat, cheek resting on my palm, enraptured as though reading a classic romance with a glass of good wine by a roaring fireplace.

Happily, my partner – who never saw the first film and felt much the same way about seeing this one as I did about my original Blockbuster rental – felt as though he were sitting at the fireplace beside me.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0381681/