You will never look at your neighbours in the same way again...

Rating: 7/10 (30 March 2020)

Despite all the plaudits - including 5 Oscars, 6 BAFTAs and 3 Golden Globes - I didn't love this film. It focuses on the trials and tribulations of ostensibly happy, humdrum daily life with all of the idiosyncrasies engendered by the bored, frustrated and jealous people whose lives are pretty empty of meaningful experiences from day to day. I struggled from the outset to see why anyone would be besotted with the rather skeletal "Angela" (Mena Suvari); perhaps that is what makes Kevin Spacey's performance so appreciable as the pretty unlikeable voyeur ("Lester"). Are we supposed to like him; sympathise with him, hate him - all of those? I didn't know - and I don't suppose that I really bothered much either. His self-induced mid-life crisis was rather tedious as a storyline, regardless of the actor's (superb) quality of character delivery. Clearly Sam Mendes had a vision for this - but like life itself, it is all over the place. By the time we get to the repressed gay aspects of "Lester" and the shame/depression and brutality that it appears to evoke from his thoroughly flawed personality I needed to come up for air... Without a doubt it is a well constructed piece of cinema, but the underlying complexities are so convoluted as to render it little more than an over-long sad indictment of American suburban existence where all human life appears to exist within one single street...