Possible minor spoilers...
You know, if this movie had been edited better in the first half (or first two thirds, whatever), I suspect I'd have liked it better and rated it higher.
Here's the thing: The final third of the movie significantly informs the first two thirds. It's what makes the movie. So you don't want to dawdle getting to that final third. But neither do you want to shortchange the first two thirds.
The trick is to show enough of the first two thirds--the decline of a father grieving the death of his son during a college campus shooting two years earlier--for us to get that yeah, he has certainly declined, yeah he's depressed, he's lost, and yes, he's reconnecting in some way to his dead son by listening to the songs the son wrote and left behind. But not so much of this that I start going into a coma and have to FAST FORWARD through it! I mean, the songs are mostly not all that compelling, and you can only watch someone being depressed and mopey and anti-social for so long...
And as another poster pointed out, we know that the father is going to give in to the troubled young man (Quentin) who keeps wanting them to sing the dead son's music, so why drag that out?
But no, we have to keep seeing the father rejecting friendly advances, being moody, saying little, and doing random acts that make us not particularly sympathetic to his situation.
William H. Macy is lucky that I stuck it out until the final third of the movie, when it starts picking up the pace and becoming interesting.
So, it's an okay movie, if hamstrung by crummy pacing/editing, but whittle away about 15 minutes and it would have been much better, IMHO.
You know, if this movie had been edited better in the first half (or first two thirds, whatever), I suspect I'd have liked it better and rated it higher.
Here's the thing: The final third of the movie significantly informs the first two thirds. It's what makes the movie. So you don't want to dawdle getting to that final third. But neither do you want to shortchange the first two thirds.
The trick is to show enough of the first two thirds--the decline of a father grieving the death of his son during a college campus shooting two years earlier--for us to get that yeah, he has certainly declined, yeah he's depressed, he's lost, and yes, he's reconnecting in some way to his dead son by listening to the songs the son wrote and left behind. But not so much of this that I start going into a coma and have to FAST FORWARD through it! I mean, the songs are mostly not all that compelling, and you can only watch someone being depressed and mopey and anti-social for so long...
And as another poster pointed out, we know that the father is going to give in to the troubled young man (Quentin) who keeps wanting them to sing the dead son's music, so why drag that out?
But no, we have to keep seeing the father rejecting friendly advances, being moody, saying little, and doing random acts that make us not particularly sympathetic to his situation.
William H. Macy is lucky that I stuck it out until the final third of the movie, when it starts picking up the pace and becoming interesting.
So, it's an okay movie, if hamstrung by crummy pacing/editing, but whittle away about 15 minutes and it would have been much better, IMHO.