Product: Greenfingers [Region 2] (2002)
Rating: 4.0
Slight but sweet, sentiment without sentimentality
Rottentomatoes.com, netflix, and Amazon reviews have taught me something astonishing: literate users of the latter services usually have better and more reliable taste than the professional critics collected on Rotten Tomatoes. Case in point: GREENFINGERS. Less than half the critics on Rotten Tomatoes gave it a favorable rating, but Amazon & netflix reviewers give it 4 stars. Apparently we appreciate its typically British understatement, mild humor, and a story which may be slight of plot but which doesn't slight its characters. (Hmmm...these are qualities which fans of LOST IN TRANSLATION claim to find in that movie. Perhaps if GREENFINGERS' director were named Coppola instead of Hershman, then he would be up for an Oscar, along with Clive Owen, Helen Mirren, and the rest of the cast and crew.)If you liked WAKING NED DEVINE or LOCAL HERO or any of a number of small, well-crafted British films about the character of ordinary people, you will probably enjoy this movie. It lacks gratuitous nudity, violence and profanity, graphic sex, special effects wizardry, and cheap shots at other cultures, but these omissions just make it better. The film is technically as self-effacing as the performances - - all in the service of story, rather than for calling attention to the makers' cleverness, or hipness, or at least what masquerades as such among the unenlightened.This is a movie about growth and transformation, not about stasis. It is about people with the character to make the most of their situation in life, no matter how apparently bleak. It is about the heroism of daily struggle to find meaning and value in the small things of everyday life, about simple faith, about making a difference, about love, forgiveness, and redemption, and ultimately about what it is to be human. Four stars.