Peter MacDonald, Brian Cox Tedious film from playwright Conor McPherson, who seems to have graduated through the ranks from a writer of theatrical monologues a film director much too quickly for his own good. There is neither intellect nor subtlety to any of it, and McPherson's direction is bland in the extreme, falling somewhere between theatre and television, but never rising to actual cinema.
Every scene is laboured and clumsy.
From the opening card game which must have some significance given its inclusion to the climax which features a man projectile vomiting on a lecture theatre full of students to the ending which tries to nonchalantly pass off its failure to coherently articulate a point of view as deliberate irresolution, it is amateurish and heavy-handed. Characters do not so much communicate as make speeches, which may be the point, but is more suitable for the kind of theatrical monologue which made McPherson famous on the Irish stage not all that long ago. Though the performances are earnest enough, the camera simply blocks out the action. McPherson never seems to realise that cinema itself offered a superb opportunity to really delve into those awkward spaces between spoken conversations which he seems to think are profoundly expressive. It is extremely theatrical yet without the discipline of a full-fledged theatrical production.