Thomas Haden Church is tailor made for the role as the boozing, pot smoking, womanizing, marginally employed brother, but his efforts fall flat. His deadpan delivery that works so well in Sideways seems cut off here and incomplete. Due to problems with pacing, his character is never fully fleshed out. The same goes for all of the roles — we feel rushed and shortchanged because the writer was just trying to put too much in, was trying to answer too many questions, wanted to have plot, character, and motivations all wrapped up with a nifty little baby blue bow.
And unfortunately, one can't do that, especially within the confines of a 1:35 movie. So we get shortcuts: loads of faux-academia speak; a young Republican teenage daughter to contrast her seemingly liberal surroundings; the former student now an M.D., with an inexplainable attraction to the overweight and dour professor; the brother who lives on the edges --for what reasons, we never find out; the son who (other than selling a poem to The New Yorker) exists in the vacuum of a dorm; and the lead character --the professor with just enough shaggy dumpiness who never quite wins anyone over convincingly.
I wanted to like this movie, and in fact there were several good scenes, with some really great lines. I can't fault a single performance. But this gets down to problems with the foundation. The writing and character development weren't strong enough on the page. This was a movie that simply tried to be too many things in order to be liked.
.jpg?t=20120527181101)
Article comments