*****SPOILER WARNING, THIS REVIEW CONTAINS THE ENTIRE PLOT OF THE MOVIE, BUT IMO IT'S NOT A PARTICULARLY GOOD ONE ANYWAY***** I have to start by saying don't let my rather damning review of this film discourage you from seeing it. I know people who love it. I, however, did not. If you're curious then just watch it.
It's about a small town in Colorado that receives an unexpected visitor, on the run from gangsters. After some discussion this quiet, small, conservative town collectively decides to harbour the fugitive. Their initial insistence that she is welcome to stay without any form of repayment is gradually eroded until she is reduced to the status of a slave/beast, and eventually is turned over to the gangsters by the one resident she had come to trust the most. The gangsters arrive, their boss is her father, and after a discussion with him about the inherent difficulty of ethical behaviour in humans (and a brief moment of clarity on the part of the fugitive) she swears allegiance to the father she was running away from and orders the gangsters to massacre everyone in the town and raze it to the ground.
The plot's reasonably interesting, but my problems with the film are mainly the thematic jumble and confused message of the piece. The film is about trust, betrayal, tolerance, loyalty, friendship, love, sex, abuse, isolation, revenge, compassion, the baseness of human nature under certain circumstances and...oh god, just too many other things.
It feels to me as if so much has been crammed into one film in an attempt to make it interesting to everyone, completely missing the point that if a universal theme is well explored then it WILL be interesting to everyone. We don't need a dozen themes thrown at us all at once.
This is reflected in the acting, which, despite being top-notch from all concerned, is distracting. The film doesn't work as an ensemble piece. Perhaps if the focus had been more heavily on Kidman's fugitive it might have held my attention a little more, but as it is I didn't know which characters were protagonists and which were antagonists, at any point. This might work in a murder mystery, but this film is resolutely anti-genre.
In a way it is also rather anti-film, being filmed as it is on a blandly furnished sound stage, with chalk marks on the floor delineating buildings, plants, street edges etc.
If this neutrality had been carried out throughout the rest of the piece, then the device might have worked, but it's (quite emphatically) set in Colorado. After 90 minutes (another thing, 150+ mins is just too long) I was yearning for some cinema, to see those mountains the characters keep on talking about.
There is so much potential squandered in this film that I resolutely watched the conclusion, hoping for some redeeming features, but to no avail. But as I always say, just watch it and make up your own mind.
It's about a small town in Colorado that receives an unexpected visitor, on the run from gangsters. After some discussion this quiet, small, conservative town collectively decides to harbour the fugitive. Their initial insistence that she is welcome to stay without any form of repayment is gradually eroded until she is reduced to the status of a slave/beast, and eventually is turned over to the gangsters by the one resident she had come to trust the most. The gangsters arrive, their boss is her father, and after a discussion with him about the inherent difficulty of ethical behaviour in humans (and a brief moment of clarity on the part of the fugitive) she swears allegiance to the father she was running away from and orders the gangsters to massacre everyone in the town and raze it to the ground.
The plot's reasonably interesting, but my problems with the film are mainly the thematic jumble and confused message of the piece. The film is about trust, betrayal, tolerance, loyalty, friendship, love, sex, abuse, isolation, revenge, compassion, the baseness of human nature under certain circumstances and...oh god, just too many other things.
It feels to me as if so much has been crammed into one film in an attempt to make it interesting to everyone, completely missing the point that if a universal theme is well explored then it WILL be interesting to everyone. We don't need a dozen themes thrown at us all at once.
This is reflected in the acting, which, despite being top-notch from all concerned, is distracting. The film doesn't work as an ensemble piece. Perhaps if the focus had been more heavily on Kidman's fugitive it might have held my attention a little more, but as it is I didn't know which characters were protagonists and which were antagonists, at any point. This might work in a murder mystery, but this film is resolutely anti-genre.
In a way it is also rather anti-film, being filmed as it is on a blandly furnished sound stage, with chalk marks on the floor delineating buildings, plants, street edges etc.
If this neutrality had been carried out throughout the rest of the piece, then the device might have worked, but it's (quite emphatically) set in Colorado. After 90 minutes (another thing, 150+ mins is just too long) I was yearning for some cinema, to see those mountains the characters keep on talking about.
There is so much potential squandered in this film that I resolutely watched the conclusion, hoping for some redeeming features, but to no avail. But as I always say, just watch it and make up your own mind.
Tell Your Friends