Napping 'round the bend

Rating: 2/10 (19 February 2009)

A sad case of misjudged proportions leading to stylistic collapse. A twainian short story overblown into a computer-generated Great American Novel with mounds of rhetorical filling as substitute for authentic epic stature. However "fresh" and "light" the intentions, all of the anecdote's squeezable curiosity - mostly on the visual side - dries up well before either Pitt or Blanchett reach the acting age, while the tenuous sketch has to drag along for another ninety minutes, weighed down by platitude after platitude about "Life Twists" and "Fate Tricks", till it's prematurely buried with the customary Southern grace and a sermon somewhere in the Fifties - and still one reel to go. Adulthood can be dull and unsurprising, but the artistic rendering of it should not. The failure is even greater if you have lavished talents on capturing the uniqueness of human existence - and on the backdrop of Great History, no less - to the effect of telling the same old story in the same old way. Memory isn't a cliché. Go Katrina!