Writer-director Ethan Hawke’s talky talky tale of a romance gone bad stars Mark Webber and Catalina Sandino Moreno (Maria Full of Grace). A 20-year-old aspiring actor meets an aspiring singer in a New York City bar. Things go well for a time, but as Webber’s narration tells us from the start, “by the time I was 21 I was heartbroken.” That is very nearly all of the story. Hawke, who adapted his own novel, also appears as the father who lost touch when his wife (Laura Linney) and young son left him, and Texas. This is a subplot that is supposed to connect to an inability to recover from that later heartbreak, but I’m not sure that made sense to me. The gist of it, and the thing the two stories do have in common, is having to reconcile and accept things that will never make complete sense, because people do things for which they themselves can’t, or won’t, articulate the reasons. Probably a lot of people (most?) will find this movie overlong, though less morose than it might sound, because really the bulk of the movie is about the process of understanding this, about things sinking in. The singer-songwriter Jesse Harris, besides appearing as a musician, contributes a bundle of songs voiced by Americana stars like Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Norah Jones, and Cat Power. Their laid-back vibe approximates the feel of this movie.
IMDB link
reviewed 9/7/07
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