Could have been great but isn't...

This director is totally inept, and it ruined what could have been a great film. The actors are superb, the story is pretty good, the locations are great, but the director doesn't get how to put energy onto film. He also doesn't know how to change or cut some dialog that just doesn't work on film, nor how music goes.

The final scene of this film could have been very moving without being cheesy, like a well done scene from Born On the Fourth of July or something like that. Instead, it totally let the air out of the conclusion this film had been building up to. All the characters were suddenly reinvented, and this totally pathetic music was playing through it. The end was so hammy and cheesy that it ended up like an after school special from the 70s or a very special episode of Punky Brewster.

This movie touches on some really good topics and has some great elements, but doesn't really develop and handle them right. A good example is the very chilly, tense relationship in the main family. A lot of good scenes with great actors like Bruce Dern are ruined by other scenes that needn't have been in there. At times, it looks like it is going the way of Ordinary People, which in my opinion is THE gold standard in the old "tense family" concept as portrayed on film, then the director blows it.

I'd like to say that director Ernest Thompson didn't understand the script or wasn't given the leeway to fix it for film, but he WROTE this script!

This film has another problem that is common to films about the 60s: 60s music. When people make films about the 60s, they make it seem as if 100% of the music played in the 60s was psychedelic and/or political/anti-establishment. It was not. In fact, barely 2% of the charting music with airplay was even remotely psychedelic or political, but every scene from every film like this is stuffed with Buffalo Springfield, Bob Dylan, Strawberry Alarm Clock, and other similar cliche 60s songs. Radio stations would barely touch anything that was psychedelic and/or political/anti-establishment. For example, there was about 20x as much airplay for Motown music, and even more for other pop music, but these filmmakers just wreck these films by making each one a caricature of itself, by not only stuffing them full of songs that were not typical, but by placing them in scenes that don't even need pop music. Watch an episode of Cold Case if you like needless overuse of pop songs forcibly placed in scenes that don't need music at all.

The director ruins it, but it is still a film worth watching for free if you haven't already.