I agree with others who did not like the film. It was like watching a jigsaw puzzle being put together without a picture of the whole scene. It's not that the acting was bad in my opinion, but there was no reason to make the story so difficult to follow. It wasn't until I had finished watching the show that I looked at commentaries, and at IMDb to find out who was who, and who was related to whom, and by what connection.
OK, we all have a past and many of us have complaints about our parents, but most of us do not air them, because we are far from perfect ourselves. We also learn as we grow older (hopefully), and our misbehavior toward our children was not with the intention of hurting them -- mostly it was because of personal anxieties about life, and how to protect our children from many destructive mistakes.
By contrast to this movie about family dysfunction, and the processes of remembering the past, another screenplay which uses some of the same techniques, and which is possibly my favorite teleplay of all time is the original version of Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective. Never have I seen a screenplay so perfectly written and directed and cast and acted as this one. It is a marvel, and it contains a lot of ironic humor too.
The Robert Frost poem of the same name is a very good analogy. There are some few who are true stars, and there ore others who would like to be stars but are like the fireflies. Their little lights may appear momentarily to light the night sky, but they do not last long.
OK, we all have a past and many of us have complaints about our parents, but most of us do not air them, because we are far from perfect ourselves. We also learn as we grow older (hopefully), and our misbehavior toward our children was not with the intention of hurting them -- mostly it was because of personal anxieties about life, and how to protect our children from many destructive mistakes.
By contrast to this movie about family dysfunction, and the processes of remembering the past, another screenplay which uses some of the same techniques, and which is possibly my favorite teleplay of all time is the original version of Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective. Never have I seen a screenplay so perfectly written and directed and cast and acted as this one. It is a marvel, and it contains a lot of ironic humor too.
The Robert Frost poem of the same name is a very good analogy. There are some few who are true stars, and there ore others who would like to be stars but are like the fireflies. Their little lights may appear momentarily to light the night sky, but they do not last long.