Blatant missed opportunity

Rating: Null/10 (7 April 2005)

Hilary Swank is a great talent. This realization is my only reward from this long movie. The basic flaw is familiar: The Tendency of Hollywood and the Oscar-arena features to avoid anything resembling subtle gestures. The basic idea of the script is to explore the potentialities of a relationship between a man who lost his daughter (for a reason unknown to us) and carries a great void within himself, and a woman who lost her father and carries the pain of his absence as it is cruelly mirrored through the grotesque selfishness of the rest of her family. So far so good. But why make everything so explicit? So obvious? The critical and crucial subject of the intersection between fathers-daughters on the one hand and woman-man on the other hand provides so many roads to riddles, complications,and liberating insights. But here, all we have are obvious caricatures. Moreover, these are almost explicitly gendered, as the whole frame is that of women dependency and male desire for control, although of course the trajectory is towards a kind of salvation, in the form of male softness. and there is too much boxing...