BEFORE: Laura Linney carries over from "The Squid and the Whale", and two other actors carry over from that film too. I love when multiple connections are made, it's sort of a sign that I'm on the right track somehow, though I'm sure it's really all just random chance. Maybe sometimes the same director will cast a lot of the same people, or maybe the same casting director has a pool of people they like to draw from, it's tough to say. I probably pay too much attention to the actors, anyway, maybe I'd get different insights if I focused more on who wrote and/or directed each film. This time, it's the same guy, Kenneth Lonergan, who also directed "Manchester By the Sea", which I watched last year.
I think only Matthew Broderick appeared in both Lonergan films, though - except for Lonergan himself, who made a cameo in both.
THE PLOT: A single mother's life is thrown into turmoil after her struggling, rarely-seen younger brother returns to town.
AFTER: I thought for a minute maybe this film was set in Massachusetts, because Ruffalo's character made references to getting back to Worcester - but no, it's set in upstate NY, according to IMDB, in a town called Scottsville. But filmed in a town in the Catskills, not in Western NY near Rochester, where Scottsville is.
Some of this feels a bit like last night's film, "The Squid and the Whale", in that there's a lot of ground covered within a family dynamic, and it almost feels like this film was in danger of also firing in too many directions at once. But I think this one got reined in at the end, and at least there was something akin to a resolution, or at least an ending of sorts. Still, the complex brother-sister relationship is examined, where the brother, Terry, is a real screw-up who's been wandering around the country, while the sister, Sammy, stayed put and had a son, but didn't marry the father. They were orphaned back when they were kids, so some people in the town are still sympathetic to them, those who remember the accident anyway.
Sammy's definitely straight-laced and a bit uptight, except for the single mother thing she seems to have things mostly together, except a new boss at the bank who berates her for every little thing, and doesn't understand that she needs to take time off every day to make sure her son gets a ride home from the bus stop. I'm not sure if this is a NITPICK POINT or not, because when I was a kid, the bus stopped very close to my house, and I could walk the last few blocks - why is this bus dropping a kid off so far from his home? Isn't the point of the bus to drive kids home? I suppose if she drove the kid home from school, she'd seem overprotective, which she is, but it's a weird choice to depict a kid who needs to take a bus AND a car-trip home. Poetic license perhaps?
Terry rolls into town, a day later than he said he would, and that sort of tells you what you need to know about him, he's not dependable, always borrowing money and saying that he'll pay it back, and even after he arrives he's already saying he's got to get back to his girlfriend, but then his plans change and he stays around. Sure enough, he's a bit of a bad influence on his nephew, taking him out to bars to shoot pool and accidentally letting slip information about the kid's father, when his mother was hoping to shield him from all of that. Whether it was right of her to withhold this information is debatable, but it wasn't necessarily Terry's place to spill the beans.
But Terry and his nephew do grow closer together, and Sammy works out a unique solution to defusing the tension with her boss. However, solving any of these problems seems to only lead to more problems down the line, and maybe that feels very realistic to you, depending on your own personal situation, I suppose. This is meant to be one of those slice-of-lice comedy-dramas, and it also manages to unpack questions about morality, religion, fidelity, and dealing with the big and little tragedies that somehow combine to make up everyone's lives.
In the end it's great to visit your family members and catch up with them, but at some point you may realize why you left town in the first place, I've always found that to be true.
Also starring Mark Ruffalo (last seen in "Thor: Ragnarok"), Matthew Broderick (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Jon Tenney (last seen in "Rabbit Hole"), Rory Culkin (last seen in "The Night Listener"), Halley Feiffer (also carrying over from "The Squid and the Whale"), Michael Countryman (ditto), Amy Ryan (last seen in "Bridge of Spies"), Gaby Hoffmann (last seen in "Wild"), Adam LeFevre (last seen in "The Bonfire of the Vanities"), Josh Lucas (last seen in "Wonderland"), J. Smith-Cameron (last seen in "Sabrina"), Kenneth Lonergan, Betsy Aidem (last seen in "Far From Heaven"), Nina Garbiras, Kim Parker.
RATING: 5 out of 10 corroded pipes
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