Rating of
3/4
Everyone, just... pretend to be normal.
TheWolf - wrote on 07/27/07
I have a hard time not liking any movie that Steve Carell is in these days. He is a brilliant man, and as far as comedy goes he knows his stuff. This movie is great, Greg Kinnear plays the father of a rag tag family that has various quirks. Richard (Kinnear) is a wannabe motivational speaker that is trying to improve the sales of his latest motivational "master piece". His wife Sheryl (Collette) tries to keep their family together but is so frustrated with her husband and nerve- shredded by the stresses of her home that it seems like she will cave in at any moment. Also in the home is Steve's elderly father, who is perpetually profane and angry and copes with the disappointments of his life by snorting heroin. Richard and Sheryl are raising two children, the cute but seemingly unremarkable Olive (Breslin) and the perpetually silent, glum, and angry Dwayne (Dano), who is marking off the days until he can go join the Air Force and escape this familial hellhole. Into this enclave of joy and bliss enters Sheryl's brother Frank, who has just been released from the hospital after trying to slit his wrists due to his unrequited love for one of his grad students. When Sheryl tells her brother that she's glad he's alive, he tonelessly responds "that makes one of us."
The acting is. Simply put, amazing. You won't see any Oscar moments here, no characters that have some particular traits that require various forms of "method acting" to perform. This is simply actors playing a bunch of people who they are clearly quite unlike, but playing them as if they are.
The film is not a family one by any means, but it is a really spectacular dark comedy for everyone else.
