While I haven’t ever seen this movie before, I feel like I’ve seen it. This type of story is recycled quite a bit. It’s a pretty standard “coming home to deal with psychological issues” story. Sometimes, I like these. I felt like About Schmidt was a quality one. This one is kind of… aimless. It’s a shame, because it’s pretty interesting, but by the end, I felt like it was missing a point.
As a character study, it’s good. It’s a pleasure to watch Jack Nicholson work. The script is interesting. The personality traits that come through are interesting. It’s tense, mostly because you keep waiting to see how Nicholson will react to whatever else is happening. He isn’t an especially likable character, even after we see more of his home life.
The only idea that seemed like it was worth exploring was the issue of people ignoring their gifts/talents because they get bored with them.
The ending is bleak. Even bleaker than the rest of the movie would imply. It’s easy to spend most of the movie hoping that Nicholson will turn around and do something good, but most of his dialogue and behavior tells us that he won’t. And at the end… he doesn’t.
There isn’t much I have to say about the movie. It’s interesting, but not especially entertaining. The highlight of it is that there’s a character named “Terry Grouse.” This is pronounced exactly like the NPR host. Making it funnier is that the character is played by Toni Basil, who went on to release the hit single “Micky.”
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