How can there be so many stupid moviegoers?

Rating: 10/10 (26 October 2003)

This is the question plaguing me after seeing the reviews posted here and on other message boards about this movie. How did audiences get so stupid? When did character studies become too complicated for the average person to follow?
Folks, this isn't a murder mystery. This movie could have been about raising soybeans. This movie is about PEOPLE. What makes them good, what makes them bad, what makes them who they are, and how fallible human beings do stupid things that haunt them for the rest of their lives. Good people do bad things, evil people live among us without being held accountable, bad guys don't get caught and there is no rhyme or reason for what happens in the world.
The reason Larry Fishburne wanted to be in this film is probably because he wanted to be part of an experience that looks as though it was one of the more satisfying ones careerwise for just about everyone in it. I agree, he is not used much, but it was nice to see him and Laura Linney even if it wasn't to great effect.
Speaking of Laura Linney, her speech at the end is her attempt to justify her life and her place in it. She judges her own cousin for her disloyalty instead of feeling anguish and compassion. She is a woman who is committed to ignoring the sins of the past and of the present to protect her future. This is a theme throughout the film. Many people have things in the past that bother them, and the film explores the consequences each person has to face--or chooses to ignore--because of what fate has visited upon them in their lives.
This is a delicate, tiny film told in epic style in a very old-fashioned manner that credits YOU with having intelligence and patience. Instead of whining that the ending is ambiguous, maybe take a minute and try to understand why the most deliberate and methodical of directors would choose to end the film in that way. What is he trying to say? That life is uncertain...that nothing is as it seems...that people are mysteries, that nothing can be taken for granted...it is a revelatory ending, in my opinion, completely perfect and utterly in keeping with the vagaries of the movie. You don't know what these people are going to do because they are REAL PEOPLE, not cardboard cutouts in a Hollywood studio executive's office being moved around to suit the plot. This movie is a MIRACLE.