This movie starts out strong. 100% engrossing, funny and finely observed. The marvelous performances (Kate Winslet might be the best actress of her generation) and the tense scenario manages to obfuscate a key fact that becomes sadly apparant by the end: there’s nothing going on here. The movie just runs out of gas and by the idiotic end you’ll feel pretty cheated.
If I’m not mistaken, I had very much the same thoughts about Field’s In The Bedroom The fact is, I hardly remember that much ballyhooed movie at all. Little Children may fare better in my memory because of the strong opening and the near Solondz-esque quality of the “town pervert” scenes (woah! that’s Moocher from Breaking Away!) but, feh, you’ve seen this movie dozens of times before. The Ice Storm. Magnolia. Blah blah blah.
And, frankly, what the hell is Todd Field’s problem? I don’t get the sense that we are supposed to see these characters in pain despite their affluence and think, “Fools! Don’t they realize what they have?” I think we are supposed to actually empathize with their “suffering.” I can’t get there, no matter how good an actress Winslet is. This movie should have stayed the satire it was in the first half hour before it devolved into whine time.
I know a lot of people who live in the suburbs. They are happy there. Dismissing everyone who lives in a suburb as a vacuous waste who only cares about commercial success is just another form of prejudice. In a post Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay world (even though I am not at liberty to discuss that movie yet) there just isn’t room for ANY prejudice: even if that prejudice is about rich, white people.
