Wow. Just wow.
What an amazing movie. With just a few alteration, I could imagine someone had fictionalized my own story.
I'm sure most of you have seen this film so I don't want to drop into the formalities of a movie review here but rather, just some rather scattershot disjointed reactions....
Wilkerson - A really cool move for them to hire an actor that the audience would immediately react with "there's no way that guy could ever look feminine" rather than take the easy route and cast a less burly actor. I have to admit there were just a couple of moments when I thought he hit a wrong note but overall, the performance really resonated with my own experience.
Lange - The right mix, for the plot of the film, of rejection and ultimately acceptance. And deftly handled the tension that remained even when she decided to accept Ruth. I don't think the role as written could have been played better.
Few others in the cast made much difference to me, they were mostly props, with two exceptions:
The son - I thought this actor, too, REALLY played his part well and while I understand that for the purpose of storeytelling they had to cram what is surely, in real life, a months or years long process into a single dramatic night - laying that aside, I thought the guy nailed the mixture of rejection (of the sort you wold extend to a stranger if you disapproved) with love and loyalty that comes with being in the same family into what ended up being massive confusion.
I would assume that sort of emotion isn't easy to convey for an actor.
The pastor - On the one hand, the part had a lot of cliche to it but on the other hand, those cliches are almost certainly what your average small town pastor, thrown into this situation, would fallback on. Having spent most of my life in a "church family" - this part to, both as written and as acted, rang very very true to me.
It's hard for me to imagine this sort of story being told any better than this film told it.
Now, here's the downside.
I tried to get my wife to watch it with me because her reaction is very much like Irma's and her relationship to me, what she values in me and so forth, is very much like the relationship in the film. i had hoped that she would be able to at least be introduced to the concept of how such a couple stays together through this sort of thing.
But she couldn't make it through it without more than one derisive comment. We only got maybe 30 r 40 minutes in before I shut it off in despair because it was provoking mostly hostility.
Maybe another day...
