A Home at the End of the World
Director: Michael Mayer
Year Released: 2004
Rating: 1.5
The fallout from the wild sixties and seventies comes in the eighties, where AIDS is shown as punishment for casual sex and where Woodstock is back to being just another vacant field (the peace movement failed, people: get over it). I'd accuse Mayer of watering down and overly simplifying Michael Cunningham's novel, but it's actually Cunningham who castrates himself, reducing his text to calculated embarrassing moments for the first hour (catching brother in bed with a hottie, getting caught smoking pot by Mom, getting caught receiving a handjob, getting caught in bed with a female roommate, having a surrogate mother ask to be crushed after her husband dies and getting caught doing a self-examination for skin lesions) and wrapping it up with a final half hour of gloominess and sad looks and regret. Colin Farrell, try as he might, doesn't convince as a soft-spoken, sexually ambiguous goody-goody baker (taking acid as a kid made him sensitive) but neither does Sissy Spacek as the ultra-liberal mother.
