Angelina Jolie: they needed someone else

Rating: 8/10 (21 January 2007)

I don't know why the review says Jolie did a good job. I thought she was awful.
She shows up, and is having animal sex with the main character in a matter of seconds. I know we can't expect much else from Hollywood these days, but it was too jarring, and she made it worse.
She seemed inconsistent with what was going on in several places, almost as if she just happened to be walking through the set of the wrong movie.
Yes, in a few parts I thought she did OK, but then there was the scene where she finally gets really mad at "mother" for never being around. It was way overdone, and out of character, given that she'd said very little about it before that. Of course, I'll admit that part of that was bad editing or something. The film frequently showed you things without explaining them, and I don't mean as a means of showing a shadowy world either, I mean outright editing storytelling mistakes because there was no information or correlation with the rest of the story.
Finally, Jolie acted like a 1990s woman the whole time. Did anyone tell her that this movie was set in 1939-1961? Still, I thought the movie was really good, even though it needs to be re-edited pretty bad.
I enjoyed the close look at an individual of that time period, and the mental games.
One thing you must do when seeing this movie is try hard to remember even little details, because they are important later on.
I thought Alex Baldwin was very good, in spite of the short time on screen, and everyone else did a really good job too.