BEFORE: Now I'm back to working my way toward's Father's Day. This is the second of five planned films about fathers and children and the complex relationships between them, but if I count "One True Thing" as the first, and "Kodachrome" as the second, then this is really the third. And as a bonus, it has the same actor in the father role that "Kodachrome" did.
Sam Bottoms carries over from "The Outlaw Josey Wales", even though that film was released nearly 35 years earlier. I just love actors with long careers.
THE PLOT: Actress Reese Holden has been offered a small fortune by a book editor if she can secure for publication the love letters that her father, a reclusive novelist, wrote to her mother, who has since passed away. Returning to Michigan, Reese finds that an ex-grad student and a would-be musician have moved in with her father, who cares more about his new friends than he does about his own health.
AFTER: Much like the father character in "One True Thing", this father is a struggling author, trying to put out a new novel but suffering from both writer's block and a pile of self-doubt. And like the father character in "Kodachrome", he appears to be in ill health and has largely given up, although we're not aware of any specific medical diagnosis or time-frame for his impending passing. But it's a little like themes from both of those films put together. The fact that a fan shows up at the author's house here suggests that he has had some success in the past, and people have therefore speculated (according to Wikipedia, I didn't make these connections myself) that this is character is a thinly veiled stand-in for famous reclusive author J.D. Salinger, although the wife's suicide does bring the story of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes to mind. Basically, it's a cobbled-together story with pieces from a bunch of different inspirations, so perhaps it's not meant to tell the story of any one author.
Once again, a Hollywood film completely mis-understands how authors write in the real world. Here the author has ONLY ONE manuscript of his greatest unpublished work, which doesn't make any sense. What if an author spent a decade writing a manuscript and for some reason kept only ONE copy? Then that copy could be lost, damaged, destroyed in a fire (or most often in movies, blown around by a gust of wind or a stray fan, comically ruining his greatest work - thankfully that does not happen here...) and then where would that author be? I can't imagine the most famous authors, say, Stephen King, still using a typewriter in this day and age, and having only one printed copy of something. Wouldn't the smartest authors have moved over to word processing by the year 2005, and kept multiple back-ups of their most important work? OK, so maybe the author character here is old and still low-tech, and doesn't understand computers, but seeing someone working with a very old-fashioned typewriter in a 2005 film still doesn't seem to make much sense.
His method of keeping the manuscript safe is also very questionable - it's buried out in the backyard. Wow, what a creative metaphor for a story that he's figuratively "buried" as well, it's down deep within him and no publisher or fan can dig it out of him. (Yeah, I'm being sarcastic here, if you can't tell.) But this is a guy who's also got his bedroom furniture out in the backyard, and sometimes sleeps there - and he lives in the Upper Peninsula in Michigan, so this doesn't make much sense. Is this guy crazy, sadistic, or just filled with guilt after the death of his wife? Maybe all three.
Meanwhile, his daughter Reese is a struggling New York theater actress, also a part-time bartender, also a full-time coke addict juggling two boyfriends (Where does she find the time? Oh, yeah, cocaine.) When a publisher contacts her to try to option her father's love letters to her dead mother, it's an opportunity for her to re-visit her father, and also cash in on her parents' reputation. Reese missed her mother's funeral, so it seems she's also filled with guilt, self-doubt and self-loathing. See, this is why I always say you have to go to every friend or relative's funeral, because if you don't go to theirs, then they won't come to yours. Umm, or something like that.
She finds that her father is now mostly living in his garage, and he's allowing a friend and an ex-student to live in the main house. It's possible, someone with a dead spouse could want to take a break from living in their own house if the memories are too painful. But Reese doesn't trust this ex-student (like in "Kodachrome", it's never really stated for sure if the younger woman is just taking care of her mentor's health, or sleeping with him as well.) or the guy who lives in the basement that was kicked out of a Christian rock band, and now keeps the author's fans from getting too close. It's not like I haven't seen Will Ferrell play a tragic character before (he did that well in "Everything Must Go"), it's just not the thing that he's best at.
This feels like the sort of small indie film that would have done very well on the film festival circuit, even though I can't find any record of it being in any festivals or winning any awards there. Except it did well at the Traverse City Film Festival in Michigan, but that's largely because it might be the first film that mentioned Traverse City in its dialogue.
I didn't really understand the ending, and I was left with the lingering question about whether Reese was going to bring the love letters to the book editor and cash in. I thought maybe the film chose not to answer this question - but it DID, and I missed it. Thankfully the plot summary on Wikipedia clued me in. This is why I always read the Wiki (and the "Trivia" and "Goofs" sections on IMDB) after watching a film.
Also starring Zooey Deschanel (last seen in "Failure to Launch"), Ed Harris (last seen in "Kodachrome"), Will Ferrell (last seen in "Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie"), Amelia Warner (last seen in "Aeon Flux"), Amy Madigan (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Anthony Rapp (last seen in "Six Degress of Separation"), Mary Jo Deschanel (last seen in "Breach"), Robert Beitzel, Dallas Roberts (last seen in "The Grey"), Deirdre O'Connell (last seen in "What Happens in Vegas"), Darrell Larson, John Bedford Lloyd (last seen in "Riding in Cars With Boys"), Mandy Seigfried (last seen in "Two Weeks Notice"), Ivan Martin, Betsy Aidem (last seen in "The Greatest Showman"), Guy Boyd, with cameos from Rachel Dratch (last seen in "My Life in Ruins"), Michael Chernus (last seen in "Spider-Man: Homecoming").
RATING: 4 out of 10 golf balls
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