From the title and the hype about Joan Allen’s performance, I really didn’t expect this movie to be so funny. It’s does creep around near-Ice Stormlike depressive themes at times, but mostly it’s pretty uplifting (the theme is pretty much “Every cloud has a silver lining”). Allen’s performance is every bit as good as I’d heard, a tour de force if I actually felt comfortable using that term. Alicia Witt, Keri Russell, Evan Rachel Wood (still looking Thirteen, still channeling Dominique Swain in Lolita, but I still don’t mind :)) and the other one whose name I don’t know are all great as her daughters, and Kevin Costner is hilarious as the ex-baseball-star, local DJ, drunk/stoned/both neighbour.

One criticism I have is that I had the ending guessed around 10 minutes in. The funeral opening (most of the movie is a flashback) just makes it kind of too obvious. I’ll admit that there were little things that made me think perhaps something else might happen, ie someone else might die, the repeated motif of Allen driving too fast round a particular corner for some reason, Wood’s bungee-jumping, drug-taking gay boyfriend, but overall, the ending is just way too obvious. That’s not to say it’s a bad ending – it’s actually kind of brilliant – but I think it’s just a problem in the writing, the set-up of it etc.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 24th, 2005 at 12:39 am in 4 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.