An average movie

To be honest, I had no idea what to expect from this flick but since there was a nice cast involved, I was quite eager to check it out. Well, eventually, even though the damned thing definitely had some potential, I’m afraid it was a little bit too much to chew on for Ewan McGregor for his first directing effort. Afterwards, I was wondering why McGregor didn’t follow the examples of Gary Oldman and Tim Roth. Indeed, for their first directing effort, they respectively delivered ‘Nil by Mouth’ and ‘The War Zone’ and one of the reasons these 2 movies worked so well was the fact that Oldman and Roth made movies about an environment they were both familiar with. On the other hand, McGregor, a guy who grew up in Scotland in the 80’s, decided for some reason to make a movie taking place in the US during the 60’s which was probably not the best idea. Furthermore, McGregor was rather miscast and, for this role, I think that someone like a younger Tom Cruise would have been a better choice. However, the main issue was probably that he struggled with the story itself. Indeed, it was quite complex and it was supposed to be dealing with the psychological turmoil lived by these 3 characters but, unfortunately, that was something that McGregor barely managed to scratch. I mean, this golden couple was kind, patient, not conservative whatsoever, and, yet, from the very start, there was something going on with their kid but they never dug really far enough. I mean, at some point, there was a rather ridiculous session with a speech therapist arguing that the young girl might be jealous of her mother. Seriously, since when a speech therapist might have the required skills to detect and diagnose some kind of Oedipal complex? It seemed completely way off base and it was never properly developed afterwards. Anyway, to conclude, even though this movie was pretty much a failure for McGregor as a director, it was still an intriguing story though and I think it is worth a look.