Full of imperfections that just didn't fit.

I expected more from this movie when I bought it without ever seeing it. It's not just because Grenier won me over in another recent movie he was in or because of the somewhat intriguing subject matter. But also because it had gained some notice from film festivals and gotten good feedback. It seemed like something worth seeing and I was excited to see Grenier do something other than the semi-clean roles we're used to seeing him in.

Although Grenier's acting didn't let me down, the movie began slow. It appeared to have some direction in the beginning as we find out some of his background and explore some of his inner thoughts and nightmares that he shares with his psychiatrist. Even the nightmares that involve murdering her seem to have some connection to the fact that he probably looks at her as the strong woman figure that he never really had growing up.

But the movie soon drifted into a glazed boy meets girl story. Which I understand is only leading up to what I was expecting, for it all to go awry. But it became so long, with the pointless friends that felt like nothing but filler to give the illusion that Grenier's girlfriend-to-be just didn't come out of thin air. It just drones on and on, the courtship, the twenty conversations between her, her friends, her co-workers. It begins to get never-ending with the focus kind of jumpy. Most of it could have been easily cut out and done away with to keep us from staring at the carpet as though it's suddenly the most interesting thing in the room. But, for whatever reason, it kept going without any real light at the end of the tunnel.

Finally, we reach a change. She's pregnant and again, I begin to see where it's going and raise my eyes from the carpet. He meets her parents, an odd, cold association. Understandably from the way he was behaving but it was disconnected. Sure, she begins to see that he's not perfect after the way he reacted about the baby and then how he acted at her parents house. Then his dismissal and rage at the dinner with her friends. It's not that you're completely confused at where the movie is headed but the lukewarm story combined with the random nightmares that really don't accurately show his state of mind are enough to push you dangerously close to losing interest by the time anything else happens.

And of course, as he begins to go off the deep end, she follows. Asking him to move out while telling him she had an abortion. What confused me was the fact that she seemed to want him back even after this move. Sure, she told them they could still date but did she really want that? If she did, why would she claim she had an abortion? You don't tell a guy, sane or insane, that you had an abortion unless you're going to be done with him completely. Not if you plan on dating him again. What did she really expect? His acceptance? And why the heck would she want to continue dating him if she was becoming terrified of his actions? Alright, maybe she did really want to take it slower. But if she did, she must be one of the dumbest women out there in the dating world. Or she was a little crazy too to allow things to be rushed, cut him off completely with an abortion, and then expect him to come back. Maybe it happens. But it just didn't fit.

Grenier doesn't take the news of abortion well, surprise surprise. His girlfriend, finacee, soon to be ex-girlfriend, or whatever has a nightmare that he tries to kill her, his psychiatrist, and she has to choke him. She wakes up to find his suitcase of past possessions, destroyed, and him there, holding a gun. Whatever her dream symbolizes in comparision to what's about to happen and what nightmares he's had, well, your guess is as good as mine. It would make more sense if he had the dream, it would be like some kind of timeline of how he's felt during the whole relationship. But she had the dream. Which makes no real sense to me. The dreams held no real meaning in this movie. It was just more filler in a movie that isn't really going anywhere.

The end might be the most annoying part. He ends his life in front of her, making her be the one to pull the trigger. Without her actually doing it. A random end to a movie that was somewhat random itself. And while this suicide is about to happen, she tells him she never had the abortion. Of course, he doesn't believe her. And we find out she was telling the truth as she hunches over the baby's crib in the end. And I wonder to myself what just happened.

The fact that he ends his life instead of trying to end hers as we all were expecting was far-fetched to me. I understand the sudden abortion of the baby mirrored the betrayal and lonliness he felt as a child and having an indirect part in that would be a lot to swallow. But it seemed like just a way to tie up the movie. I guess he tried to get back out there and go on with his life. He considered jumping off the roof. But it was all half-hearted. There was such a lack of build-up in this movie in places there should have been.

And the fact that she lied about the abortion and had the baby was also hard to deal with. Why did she keep the baby? Did she ever really want the baby? She never once seemed as though she did. Did she keep the baby out of guilt? Out of lonliness? It just didn't add up well enough for me.

When his girlfriend was on the phone with him in the middle of asking him to move out, she mentioned she hardly knew him and it all happened too fast. And in a way, this movie was the same. We hardly know these people. The build-up we did see wasn't enough for depth. They didn't know each other, we didn't know them. This made it harder to understand why any of it ended like it did and in the rate that it did. There just wasn't enough there in this movie to engage the viewers, to keep ties to the direction the movie was going. You can't have all of these scenes together and expect it to fit. You can't force in extra pieces of the puzzle without messing up the picture, and that's what's been done in most of this movie. There was too much there, some scenes were in desperate need of being lost on the cutting room floor. This could have been a good movie. I could try to defend it and over-analyze. I could say that Grenier's character got his perfect fit, by mother and child, his child was saved and would grow up with a mother unlike he did. I could say that his girlfriend put up with the relationship because of her need she shared with friends to have a perfect fantasy, and her having the dream at the end was her slip back into reality. I could say Grenier's abrupt end to his life made sense because of what he'd been through and the fact that he'd always been unstable. I could try to save this movie in any way possible but it just wouldn't fit with what's there.

This could have been a good movie, it really had some promise in it. But it was lacking in most scenes, it was overdone in others, and some of it was just too unrealistic to swallow. Imperfect, didn't fit. I hoped for more. With just about any movie I see, I'd give it a shot once but don't be surprised if you're wishing for something more to hold onto.