As good as they say it is

Rating: 9/10 (24 February 2007)

I don't like violent movies and held off for a long time before finally succumbing to all of the good press and the Oscar nomination this movie got.
I did have to cover my eyes in a couple of places, but it was totally worth it. Most of the movie is not violent, and you can pretty much tell when the ugly parts are coming.
I wondered how a movie could be both violent and a sweet fantasy, and how the light and dark moments would come together. But they do.
You can understand how a good mother might be willing to suspend disbelief in order to become involved with a man who turns out to be a total brute so that she can escape the hand-to-mouth existence that she and her daughter had been living since her husband's death.
You can understand the girl's desire to escape her mother's decline and her stepfather's brutishness. Is she really the long-lost princess of an underground world? Are the fairies real? What is real? I was never quite certain.
Onc criticism I would levy is that it seemed that the movie was making a good guy/bad guy, two-sided war out of what was a very complicated, many-sided war full of treachery on the right and the left. But maybe I should just look at it as a small piece of larger picture.
That comment aside, the movie is very well acted and engaged me throughout. I highly recommend it, which is remarkable given the reservations I had going into it.