An excellent crime thriller with a cracking, intelligent script that's only slightly marred by wildly uneven performances and an implausible final act.
The fractured narrative works incredibly well. Vast amounts of information are withheld to great effect as the revelations - small and large - come thick and fast. Telling Hank and Andy's stories pretty much separately means that it feels almost like a competition to see who's in worse trouble. Just when we think one of them has hit rock bottom, it's revealed that the other learnt even more bad news that will impact both of them - and it all comes from credible sources. There's no broken down cars or flat cell phone batteries here; everything that befalls them feels realistic yet almost fated.
The tension is palpable in just about every scene, helped along by a truly fantastic, immediate score.
Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke are either excellent or terrible depending on the scene they're in. both of them vacillate wildly between impressive naturalistic moments and ridiculously affected overacting which at times makes some scenes inadvertently comic. I have no idea what Albert Finney was thinking - he's usually a great actor - but he's horrible here. Marisa Tomei does her usual great work and the quality of her performance is sustained throughout. What's puzzling though is why the script calls for her to be so comic. She feels at times like a character who's wandered in from a different movie. Still, the role is more complex than any of the others and she handles it brilliantly.
The final act goes too far over the top and doesn't feel true to the rest of the story, which is a shame. All the other faults are minor but this one really takes the film down a notch or two.
Nevertheless this remains a near-great film, and on the occasions when everything is pulling in the same direction it works astonishingly well.
The fractured narrative works incredibly well. Vast amounts of information are withheld to great effect as the revelations - small and large - come thick and fast. Telling Hank and Andy's stories pretty much separately means that it feels almost like a competition to see who's in worse trouble. Just when we think one of them has hit rock bottom, it's revealed that the other learnt even more bad news that will impact both of them - and it all comes from credible sources. There's no broken down cars or flat cell phone batteries here; everything that befalls them feels realistic yet almost fated.
The tension is palpable in just about every scene, helped along by a truly fantastic, immediate score.
Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke are either excellent or terrible depending on the scene they're in. both of them vacillate wildly between impressive naturalistic moments and ridiculously affected overacting which at times makes some scenes inadvertently comic. I have no idea what Albert Finney was thinking - he's usually a great actor - but he's horrible here. Marisa Tomei does her usual great work and the quality of her performance is sustained throughout. What's puzzling though is why the script calls for her to be so comic. She feels at times like a character who's wandered in from a different movie. Still, the role is more complex than any of the others and she handles it brilliantly.
The final act goes too far over the top and doesn't feel true to the rest of the story, which is a shame. All the other faults are minor but this one really takes the film down a notch or two.
Nevertheless this remains a near-great film, and on the occasions when everything is pulling in the same direction it works astonishingly well.