Overrated! But not bad.

Rating: 7/10 (12 May 2001)

One of the main faults I found with this film (and I will admit I looked for them because of the hype) is that many people said it reflected real-life, yet it's atmosphere was too surreal to allow the viewer to feel any relation to the film. Likewise the characters and their situations were all too far to the extremes in their makeup to reflect the much more complicated lives we lead.
In a more entertainment driven sense, however, the performances were very good and the script was well-written, funny and full of the right amount of emotion. The story was immersive and includes a few instances that genuinely leave you guessing until the last minute.
It's not quite as deep as the hype made it sound, the overall message seems fairly simple, that we should understand what we want better and try to avoid the repressive things in society or they will bring us down, basically to relax more. If the lives in America's suburban neighbourhoods are more like this overall then I think they do have serious problems. Looking at my own life and those of people around me, even we of the working class suburbs who work most of the time lead much more varied and colourful lives than here.
There is a tendency today to overemphasize the number of problems in family life, something perpetuated by the perception of problems in family life and looking too deeply into minor things that were ignored in the past because people didn't have the time to notice them and just got on. There is no denying that there are more divorces and single-parents e.t.c. but is this necessarily a bad thing, might it just be a step forward into creating less rigid relationships that allow us to be happier, I think these are just freedoms that weren't expressed before because society didn't allow them but that the number of genuinely happy families is the same, if not higher than that of previous generations.
Or am I just too much of an optimist in that sense.