There is nothing inauthentic about this movie, and it’s a nice actors’ showcase for Bello and Sheen, who uses an American accent. However, everything was pretty much what I expected to be. Tears, pity, confrontation. True, it didn’t occur to me, as it does the husband here, that there would be a need to craft a media statement to assure the public and the families of the other students of their sorrow for what their son had done. But I did anticipate that they would wonder about why he did it, a question the film raises but doesn’t try to answer. And that really is the question you want answered in a film like this. It wouldn’t be fair to ask a film to supply an explanation for such a rare event. But it would have been more compelling to have explored the parent-child relationship as it was rather than only seeing a husband and wife wondering, as I was, later.
Showing posts with label school shooting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label school shooting. Show all posts
Friday, June 10, 2011
Beautiful Boy (**3/4)
This is a heartfelt drama about parents grieving for a child, with one difference: their son had, previous to killing himself, shot several classmates at college. The parents (Michael Sheen and Maria Bello), already having marital difficulties, go through the expected steps of sorrow, shock (second, because they don’t immediately learn that he was the shooter), self-blame, and blaming each other. Despite the added dimension of learning their son is a killer, the drama plays a lot like the better Rabbit Hole. Even though the couple there are merely dealing with an accidental death, there is similarity in the focus on each partner’s different grieving style, and how it affects the couple’s relationship.
There is nothing inauthentic about this movie, and it’s a nice actors’ showcase for Bello and Sheen, who uses an American accent. However, everything was pretty much what I expected to be. Tears, pity, confrontation. True, it didn’t occur to me, as it does the husband here, that there would be a need to craft a media statement to assure the public and the families of the other students of their sorrow for what their son had done. But I did anticipate that they would wonder about why he did it, a question the film raises but doesn’t try to answer. And that really is the question you want answered in a film like this. It wouldn’t be fair to ask a film to supply an explanation for such a rare event. But it would have been more compelling to have explored the parent-child relationship as it was rather than only seeing a husband and wife wondering, as I was, later.
viewed 5/25/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 6/9/11
There is nothing inauthentic about this movie, and it’s a nice actors’ showcase for Bello and Sheen, who uses an American accent. However, everything was pretty much what I expected to be. Tears, pity, confrontation. True, it didn’t occur to me, as it does the husband here, that there would be a need to craft a media statement to assure the public and the families of the other students of their sorrow for what their son had done. But I did anticipate that they would wonder about why he did it, a question the film raises but doesn’t try to answer. And that really is the question you want answered in a film like this. It wouldn’t be fair to ask a film to supply an explanation for such a rare event. But it would have been more compelling to have explored the parent-child relationship as it was rather than only seeing a husband and wife wondering, as I was, later.
Friday, April 25, 2008
The Life Before Her Eyes (***1/2)
Watching a movie is like time traveling. You sit for a couple of hours and watch someone’s life go by. Fifteen years can seem to evaporate in an instant. All of the possible plot developments are alternate realities for the characters we meet at the start of a film. Usually you don’t think of it this way, but you might when watching this melancholy drama in which Evan Rachael Wood and Uma Thurman play the same character, Diana, one as a high school student, one as a a troubled wife, parent, and teacher, living in the same small town the younger Diana speaks of leaving. The central event that divides these two selves is a horrific school shooting. The young gunman confronts Diana and her best friend in the opening sequence, but the movie cuts back and forth in time before we learn exactly what happens.
The adult-Diana scenes reveal an emotionally scarred woman, once who has lost the carefree air of the young one. Wood’s performance captures the restlessness and slight smugness of a girl who knows she is pretty, yet in adulthood this confidence is gone. Later on, though, you see the seeds of this self-doubt. Does tragedy change people, or merely bring out different aspects of their personalities? Director Vadim Perelman (The House of Sand and Fog), saturating the screen with dreamy close-up shots and recurring dialogue and images, gives the film a dreamy quality in which past and present seem to merge.
I wavered about the ending of the movie. Is it brilliant, or just a gimmick? Ultimately, the extreme cleverness in the way Perelman and screenwriter Emil Stern (who adapted a novel by Laura Kasischke) structured the story won me over. Parts of the movie that seemed unclear, or anachronistic, suddenly made sense at the end. I noticed some of the hints it drops about this beforehand, but didn’t quite figure it out. However, the quality of the movie, especially its depiction of the relationship between Diana and her good-girl best friend, would have won me over even had the ending been the more predictable one I’d imagined.
IMDB link
viewed 5/8/08 at Ritz 5; reviewed 5/9/08
The adult-Diana scenes reveal an emotionally scarred woman, once who has lost the carefree air of the young one. Wood’s performance captures the restlessness and slight smugness of a girl who knows she is pretty, yet in adulthood this confidence is gone. Later on, though, you see the seeds of this self-doubt. Does tragedy change people, or merely bring out different aspects of their personalities? Director Vadim Perelman (The House of Sand and Fog), saturating the screen with dreamy close-up shots and recurring dialogue and images, gives the film a dreamy quality in which past and present seem to merge.
I wavered about the ending of the movie. Is it brilliant, or just a gimmick? Ultimately, the extreme cleverness in the way Perelman and screenwriter Emil Stern (who adapted a novel by Laura Kasischke) structured the story won me over. Parts of the movie that seemed unclear, or anachronistic, suddenly made sense at the end. I noticed some of the hints it drops about this beforehand, but didn’t quite figure it out. However, the quality of the movie, especially its depiction of the relationship between Diana and her good-girl best friend, would have won me over even had the ending been the more predictable one I’d imagined.
IMDB link
viewed 5/8/08 at Ritz 5; reviewed 5/9/08
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