A drama that is centered around a troubled teenage girl and a family that is trying to get over the loss of their son.A drama that is centered around a troubled teenage girl and a family that is trying to get over the loss of their son.A drama that is centered around a troubled teenage girl and a family that is trying to get over the loss of their son.
- Awards
- 3 nominations
- Bennett Brewer
- (as Aaron Johnson)
- Director
- Writer
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaSusan Sarandon was initially reluctant to tackle the role of the grieving mother in the film, as she's played similar parts in recent years, most notably in Moonlight Mile (2002) and In the Valley of Elah (2007). She was impressed with Writer and Director Shana Feste's eccentric script, and the fact that the film would shoot close to her New York City area house on a quick twenty-eight-day schedule was also appealing. Still, it took a phone call from Pierce Brosnan (who had just signed on to co-star) to finally convince her to commit to the film.
- GoofsThe scene of the accident is described in dialogue (particularly by Grace Brewer) as having surveillance cameras which recorded the crash and its aftermath, and Jordan Walker, the driver who smashed into Bennett and Rose, claims that he "had a green light", clearly referring to an intersection. Yet when the Brewer family and Rose visit the crash site, it is on a narrow country road in a wooded area, with no intersections, traffic lights or cameras in sight.
- Quotes
Rose: I knew this boy... who was really wonderful to me. The first time I saw him was in freshman English. He wore a baseball hat on the first day of school, and our teacher made him take it off and his hair was all pasted on top of his head, and he smiled at me while he tried to fix it. We watched each other after that. And I started to feel like I knew him. I looked at his yearbook picture so often I knew his face by heart. Our senior year I took piano, and he had soccer, so we would pass each other every day after school in the exact same spot. And it became something I looked forward to. So much so that I could tell you all the days that he was absent because those were the days I was disappointed. And sometimes he would look at me, sometimes he would turn away, and sometimes it would be so intense that we would start looking at each other from the very beginning of the steps. And then on the last day... he talked to me. And everything he said was exactly how I pictured it would be. And he felt the way he felt in my dreams and I thought everything was happening exactly the way it was supposed to. And I was the happiest I've ever been. Happy and scared all at the same time. And if he had signed my belly he would have written something comforting. I was in love with him. That's why I'm keeping this baby. I was in love with him for four years. I barely knew him, but everything was exactly how I imagined it, everything was just how I pictured it. I had to keep this baby. I think he was the love of my life.
- SoundtracksNeutral Ground
Performed by Sea Wolf
A crisis of youth becomes a crisis for a whole family, and it's serious stuff. There's an attempt, very conspicuous in gesture and angst filled expressions, to be gritty and real, and it's a believable scenario. It's a tearjerker, surely, an intimate psychodrama dripping in sentiment.
However, the movie depends almost purely on this terrible crisis to succeed, and that's actually slightly backwards, in movie terms. That is, it should be the writing and acting that sweeps us in and makes us share the grief of the main characters. You end up wanting to empathize, but it's sometimes despite the movie, which pushes very hard, like a friend who wants to make you feel bad about something. It has such touching moments it's hard to quite accept that a lot of it is clumsily written, almost like a high budget beginner's film, which sounds worse than I mean it. But you'll see, I think, even if you love it thoroughly, that it works modestly. So accept its flaws, ignore the obvious flashbacks to the good times, skip the dining room table where people are sitting all on one side so we can see them all from the camera, ignore the patter that is meant to make life ordinary and doesn't, and so on. Be forgiving or give it a pass.
What saves the movie (somewhat) from its excesses is the performance of the lead girl, Rose (Carey Mulligan), and the father, Mr. Brewer, played by Pierce Brosnan, who is a nuanced dad, whatever his James Bond pedigree, though neither one is given decent lines to work with. (Brosnan was also a producer, go figure.) The mother is meant to be disturbed in her grief, and she sure is. The sexy grad assistant is too too obvious even for the movies. And the brother, well, what is his role, actually, just to add a second improbable plot? And there is surveillance video of the crash, which is beyond even reasonable open-mindedness, given the isolation implied by the first several minutes of the movie. The sensationalism of that, alone, will warn you of what's to come.
Okay, one last confession. It gets so emotionally atomic at times, with the throbbing cellos coming in the background, I had to laugh out loud. I swear. And yet, I see how it deals with some truly, believably gorgeous stuff.
- secondtake
- Jul 12, 2010
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Details
Box office
- Budget
- $6,000,000 (estimated)
- Gross US & Canada
- $114,766
- Opening weekend US & Canada
- $33,616
- Apr 4, 2010
- Gross worldwide
- $987,053
- Runtime1 hour 39 minutes
- Color
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 2.35 : 1
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