Supporting him is the very fun Julia Roberts and the fantastic Philip Seymour Hoffman. Roberts seems a little bit off-kilter here but to me that was part of the character; that plastic, driven type who’s just a lot of fun to be around, whatever the conversational subject at hand might be. However it’s Hoffman who puts in the best performance, agreed upon by the Academy as they nominated him for Best Supporting Actor earlier this year. This guy could stand next to people like Marlon Brando or Daniel Day-Lewis and he wouldn’t seem remotely out of place. Along with his amazing performances in The Savages and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead this has been an impressive year for him indeed; that’s a triple punch of performances to shout from the movie theatre roofs about.
Like I said, I am not savvy about the events that the film tackles so I can’t say whether or not they take liberties with the facts. Perhaps it’s time for me to brush up on certain subjects I am not familiar with, just so I can keep on track when a film like this comes along. All I can say, as an uninformed viewer, I didn’t feel I had learned anything all that important from this.
I certainly welcome more films like this which offer up such impressive casts and such well written screenplays. In this case, however, it doesn’t help that the rest of it wasn’t all that interesting or attention grabbing, at least not to me. I’m sure there are plenty of movie goers out there who will adore this flick but I certainly can’t say I’m one of them.
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Article comments
1 - Deano
The movie is based on the excellent book by George Crile. The movie is reasonably accurate to the events portrayed in the book, although it tends to understate various elements and overplays others at times and compresses the events of 10 years into a 2 hr screenplay.
2 - Ross Miller
I think that's the movie's problem - the fact that a huge amount of events (and stuff from the book) has to be boiled down and shortened to less than a couple of hours. It's very difficult to get an adaptation (of a book or real life events) right and I think this film doesn't.