The Odd Life of Timothy Green (2012)

In the Disney studio's latest attempt at invoking the "aw shucks" reaction out of their audience, The Odd Life of Timothy Green misses the mark completely as it tries to create a story that directly appeals to the infertile-couple demographic. So the story goes that Cindy and Jim, played by Jennifer Garner and Joel Edgerton respectively, have tried everything and anything to have a child, but one doctor tells them in the opening scenes that it's just not meant to be. Drunk later that night, the couple write on paper what their perfect child would look and be like. They put these writings into a wooden box and bury it in the backyard. And in perfect Disney fashion, a child grows out of the dirt. Cindy and Jim are soon greeted by their son Timothy at age 10.
There is a pretty good concept here that would have been great in the hands of Guillermo Del Toro, Tim Burton, or even the Pixar studio. But it's a complete mess in the hands of Peter Hedges and company. It's too overly sentimental for its weird concept to work and too weird to feel believable in any sense. The script is paper thin, and is only good at creating scenes that are not only cliche but absolutely meandering, tedious, and fall flat in trying to communicate any sense of meaning.
Sure there are underlying themes of accepting people who are different, and that parents should not compare themselves to other parents, but when you hammer your audience with scene after scene that screams the take away points, it might have been a better idea to just make a documentary or create a parenting blog about the issue. And the way the story progresses to communicate these themes is paper-thin. Too many cookie cutter characters representing an ideal. Too many pointless scenes of Timothy holding his hands out to absorb sun as if it were some kind of life force; an action that is never given any meaning.
By the time the film ends, the Cindy and Jim have barely gone through any change at all. They start the film as a couple unable to give birth to a child, and in the end they learn they can adopt one. What wonderful development. Two hours of my life wasted that I'm never getting back. Perhaps there will be a better film made one day about the anxieties of parenting, one that actually has deals with such a circumstance with insight and substance and isn't as boring, uneven, or forgettable as this one.