Review: A Home at the End of the World
Some time back, Kam and I saw an interesting trailer on some DVD or other, for a movie about two men and a woman who seemed to be involved in some kind of romantic triangle. It looked like it probably had poly and queer aspects, so we kept an eye out for it. We hadn't written down the title, but eventually found it, probably through some judicious Googling: A Home at the End of the World.
And it eventually came up in my Netflix rotation, and we watched it on Saturday night. (I wrote most of this entry Sunday morning, but didn't get a chance to finish it 'til now.)
Before we started watching it, Kam asked, "Is there any way we can find out whether there are any deaths in this?" I wasn't particularly concerned about that; I figured it might get emotionally intense but that it probably wasn't all about death.
Boy was I wrong.
To minimize spoilers, I won't say more about that aspect than that there are in fact several deaths in the movie, a couple of them on-camera, and in a way they're thematically almost central to the movie. (Don't worry, it's not a serial-killer movie or anything, just a drama.)
I'll try to avoid big spoilers for the next few paragraphs, but if you don't want to know anything more about the movie, stop here.
The movie overall is good but a lot sadder than I had expected. And I don't think it's giving away too much to say that yes, there are poly and queer aspects. (I'm never quite sure how to go about saying that kind of thing; in some movies (though not this one), the poly stuff in particular is a big surprise plot twist, so in those cases I don't want to give that away, but I don't see any other way to point people interested in polyamory to such a movie. This brings up more general questions about how to inform a target audience that they're the target audience if the thing that makes them a target audience isn't obvious on cursory inspection, but I'm not gonna go into that here.)
The movie is based on a book by Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours. I haven't read either book, but I liked this movie a lot more than I liked the movie of The Hours. (By halfway through this movie I was wondering how they managed to get the movie made; finding out it was based on a Cunningham novel answered that question, given the success of The Hours.)
It's a movie that's worth watching with someone else, because there's a lot of ambiguity (about character motivations in particular) that's well worth discussing afterward. In that regard (though in no other way) it reminded me somewhat of The Sweet Hereafter, the tagline for which was "There is no such thing as the simple truth"; in both cases, I had fascinating conversations after the movie about differing interpretations of what various characters were all about and what was going on at various times.
The rest of this entry will contain some spoilers, though mostly only in general terms. (With bigger spoilers and comments about the ending down at the bottom of the entry.) Be warned.
This movie kept surprising me. At any given time in the first hour, I had pretty much no idea where it was going (except in very general terms based on my faulty memories of the trailer). I think that's largely because the structure doesn't follow any of the progressions I would've expected; the story covers a longer period and a wider variety of situations than I expected, and a lot of potentially important things don't appear on camera.
There's a long opening sequence featuring Bobby at age 9 interacting with his beloved older brother that at first I thought they should've left out but that turns out to be pretty important to Bobby's character arc. (Arguably, Bobby never really learns anything else about life after what he learns from his brother.) There are two or three scenes during high school that went in very unexpected directions; in particular, the interactions between Bobby and Jonathan's mother (played by Sissy Spacek) were not at all what I was expecting. And then there's another time jump that may or may not leave out some important stuff. And then there's the revelation that Jonathan has grown up to be gay, which I didn't figure out until well into the New York sequence. And so on.
I was going to say more here, but I ran out of time on Sunday, and I'm low on time again now, so in the interests of finishing this entry, I'll just note two further things, which are bigger spoilers than the above, including one thing about the ending:
- Bobby is a really fascinating character. He made me think of Chance from Being There (I never saw the movie, but I think I read the book at some point), in that I think other characters may have been projecting a lot onto him that wasn't necessarily there. (But I think Kam disagreed with me on that, at least to some extent.) In post-movie discussion, I began to wonder what Bobby's orientation really was; there are several possible answers. And in fact, one possible answer is that he's basically asexual. A lot depends on what you think is going on in his head at various points.
- I really want there to be more poly movies with happy endings. I started to guess by maybe halfway through that this one might not have a happy ending, but I didn't realize just how not-happy the ending was going to be. Sigh. For once I don't think the writer intended to punish his characters for their deviancy, but it does seem like part of a larger pattern of authors doing that.
