An average movie

Since I really enjoyed Kenneth Lonergan's debut, 'You can count on me', I was really eager to check his following directing effort and I was rather surprised that it took him more than a decade to finally come up with something new. Apparently, the movie was actually done much earlier, around 2006, and it was stuck for 5 years during the editing process because Lonergan's version was about 3 hours long but he was supposed to make something much shorter. Eventually, Scorsese edited the theatrical version which was still 150 minutes long and, even though it was barely seen, it was actually heralded as a masterpiece nonetheless by many critics such as Roger Ebert. To be honest, even though I thought it was quite intriguing with some very strong performances, especially by Anna Paquin, I can’t say I thought it was really amazing. I mean, the main story was not bad but did it really require such a long running time? I thought the whole thing was honestly completely all over the place constantly jumping from another trivial sub-plot to the other without really finishing what they already developed. On top of that, the main character was pretty annoying and even though her behavior seemed pretty consistent for a teenager, I'm not sure that I really cared to see her going basically nowhere for almost 3 hours. To conclude, I think that there was a lot to admire here, it was definitely an ambitious drama and even though I think it was just way too flawed to be called a masterpiece, it is still worth a look.

6/10