A mess

Rating: 5/10 (23 February 2013)

I really cannot understand all the glowing comments about this film. I thought it was a complete shambles.
I think the basic problem is that no-one seems to have subjected the script to critical analysis. If they had, they might have found lurking in there a nice little film about mentally ill people finding ways to help one another to cope with themselves and with society. What we have instead is a mess of silly plot contrivances, incomprehensible characters and a ridiculously confected happy ending.
Just consider the principal characters one by one.
Pat. For most of the film he's an out-of-control manic depressive whose mood swings and violent outbursts bring him into constant conflict, often violent, with almost everyone he comes in contact with. Then suddenly, with absolutely no reason given, he becomes at the end of the film a support for Tiffany, a reasonable ex-husband of his wife Nicki, and generally an admirable citizen. A theme for the first half of the movie is his refusal to take his medication because it makes him "fuzzy"; then there's a single scene where he takes his pills; and from then on the pills don't get a single mention. Does he take them consistently or not? Do they make him fuzzy or not? What's the point of introducing the theme and not concluding it?
Tiffany. I'm afraid that the constant switches from in control to out of control were just too much for me.
The father. I have to confess that I've never been a fan of Robert de Niro: as an actor, he seems to me to be great at playing Italian gangsters but not much else. Here however the problem is with the part. Is he an obsessive/compulsive or not? Half the time he's rational; half the time he's not. He's a bookmaker, and apparently a successful one, but he backs his sentimental favourites. Real bookmakers don't do that, and if they do, they don't survive in business for very long.
The black friend, Eddie. Again, he goes, without explanation, from a nutter obsessed with his hair to a normal, rational human being.
And I can't resist a word about the doctor. He was good, even outstanding, as a doctor. I could even believe him when he revealed at his consulting room door that he was an Eagles fan. But when he turned up at a game IN FACE PAINT, I'm afraid it was the point at which I decided, once and for all, that the film had no hope of redemption.
I read somewhere that Sydney Pollack had agreed to make this film but died before he could get started; and that he had said that it would be a very difficult film because if its mixture of styles. Pollack was a master and he could have done it, I think, but it would have been a shorter film and one from which many ingredients had been deleted. The film ended up being made by the person who wrote the screenplay, and one can't help thinking that he lacked the objectivity to see the glaring faults in the screen play and jettison or fix them.
The one person I except from criticism is Jackie Weaver. Her part was very small and her character had the huge virtue of being consistent throughout. I thought she did a very good job as the loving mother at the end of her tether.