Despite dismal reviews, Jack and I enjoyed this story of an idyllic 1950s family shaken by the daughter's 1960s radicalism, with powerful performances by all and nice production values. The feature directing debut of star Ewan McGregor (last blogged for the titular role in The Ghost Writer) co-stars the luminescent Jennifer Connelly (most recently in Noah) as the wife and a haunting Dakota Fanning (last in these pages for The Runaways) as the daughter. Peter Riegert (some of my favorites are Animal House (1978), Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979), Local Hero (1983), Crossing Delancey (1988), The Object of Beauty (1991), and The Mask (1994)) as McGregor's father and Valorie Curry (the intern chased by both Clyde and Doug in ten episodes of House of Lies) as Rita both do notable work as well.
John Romano (before adapting The Lincoln Lawyer, he wrote lots of TV episodes including L.A, Law and Knots Landing, as well as the amusing legal dramedy Intolerable Cruelty (2003)) adapted Philip Roth's Pulitzer Prize (for fiction 1998) winning novel.
Alexandre Desplat (last scored Florence Foster Jenkins) provides a lovely score which you can stream from this link, and it's complemented by this array of songs (including Moon River, which I learned to play on the piano in the very early 60s).
Note to Helene and Judy, see if you can spot the merkin!
As I said, dismal reviews--since we saw it a week ago the critics' averages have risen a point to 21% and the audiences' fallen a point to 44 on Rotten Tomatoes. Still, we liked it a lot. Sufferers of motion picture motion sickness will notice that a few highly tense scenes feature handheld cameras in the arms of runners, but they don't last long, so I won't put this on the list.
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