Dir. Shana Feste
Rating: 3.8
It’s rare that a location scout makes or breaks a film, but someone really needed to explain to Shana Feste that the growing affects of global warming are not yet so pronounced that the trees in “upstate New York” would still be green and verdant in the dead of winter.
Of course, lots of films purport to be places they’re not, and many of them have similar weather inconsistencies, but this film, concerning a grief-stricken family in the aftermath of the eldest son’s fatal car accident, continually draws our attention to its garbled time-frame. It’s as if writer/director Feste simply doesn’t care if it makes sense or not in the face of her grand designs for drama.
Naturally, the grieving parents, Allen (Pierce Brosnan) and Grace (Susan Sarandon) each repress their pain in different ways: Allen, a math professor obsessed with numbers, focuses on his work and spends time with his dead son’s girlfriend, Rose (Carey Mulligan), who arrives a few months after the funeral to tell the family she’s pregnant; Grace, meanwhile, spends her time at the ICU where the driver of the vehicle that hit her son’s stationary car lies in a coma, hoping to find out from him what her son experienced in the last few moments of his life. Their younger son, Ryan (Johnny Simmons) takes drugs, and goes to group therapy meetings.
There are many other examples of Feste’s inattention to detail: Grace studies every frame of a “surveillance tape” of the accident, it’s how she learns the other driver spoke to her son before he died. But the actual place of the accident – a winding, almost single lane road deep in a forest – couldn’t possibly have a camera anywhere near the vicinity (nor is it close to any kind of intersection, despite what the other driver suggests when he finally comes to). The film also suffers from a painfully obvious structure: After Rose moves in, the family members each go their own way, have their own emotional crescendo and then come back to the fold, cleansed of their pain. Despite the fact that the film is filled with long-minute shots of the actors staring into space in several stages of looking forlorn, we get very little sense of them other than as plot repositories, shuffling along the story as we get closer to the (inevitable) baby’s birth. In the process, it more or less goes all the places you might anticipate. Other than a New York summer’s day in January, perhaps.