Why so underrated?
Personally I think this movie was great, and I can't wrap my head around the low rating...
shareSPOILERS AHEAD! I enjoyed it also though the mediocre IMBD rating is understandable. This is a drama with many unsympathetic characters, controversial scenes (peeing), racism, murder, violent homosexual bondage with subsequent disfigurement and semi-public masturbation to name a few subjects that some may find offensive. Likely there are some offended viewers proffering only one or two stars thus skewing the rating. I know a lot of folks who think one of my all time favorites (Pulp Fiction) is pure garbage. Paperboy is polarizing, most love it or hate it.
"He killed sixteen Czechoslovakians. Guy was an interior decorator."
Yes, this is a difficult movie; I'm not sure that the director ever settled on which story he needed tell. Maybe too many story lines, too many troubled characters. Might have been able to save it with a good script edit or some mayhem in the cutting room - needed more focus. Or maybe it needed to be three hours long, so all the stories could be properly presented and worked out.
But it did get a 16-minute standing ovation at Cannes.
That's a good summary. It did feel over-directed at times. And the plot was rather choppy. The story itself was an interesting one, however it just seemed to be in too many bits and pieces and doesn't quite come together as a whole. I don't think the director knew which parts of the novel to omit and which to include but he didn't do a good job of that really. I also found the narration unnecessary and at times spelled out what was going when we could see for ourselves.
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I don't think the director knew which parts of the novel to omit and which to include but he didn't do a good job of that really.
Daniels wrote the screenplay together with the book's author, Dexter. I thought it was a lovely truncation of the novel's material, the way they compressed the trips to the swamp, for example, or how they abbreviated the post-hospital part. They also significantly improved some of the characters.
I also found the narration unnecessary and at times spelled out what was going when we could see for ourselves.
In the book the story is told by Jack, and it's very constricting, because you feel you have to fight him in order to achieve a more objective perspective (btw - probably have McConaughey to thank for the demise of that insulting queerness/illness cliche).
But the new narration? Got to agree, it failed. The story of two brothers was the guiding axis, and they ditched it entirely, shaking everything up. 'The all-seeing eye of the servant' model, while sort of quaint, doesn't work here either. Missed chance to come up with something powerful that would've gelled the film.
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He told the wrong storyline.
See the book. I wish he would've focused on the brother-relationship and Jack's development as a young man. So much greatness in the book. But I do like the film.