Unrealistic

Wow. I'm really lucky, because I agree with almost everybody who's posted in this thread. That doesn't happen often, especially when this much bad feeling has tainted the discussion.

(I have just now finished watching this movie, so anybody who wants to attack me for taking so long to join in can save his breath. Not everybody sees every movie during its opening weekend.)

I'm going to start by taking the OP KolaDude's side, because most of this thread has been hostile opposition to the point he's been making fairly consistently for almost two years now.

For a good part of the movie, I had exactly the same reaction he had, and I could very easily have dismissed it as unrealistic too. In fact, I did.

I stopped watching it for almost a month (I have it on DVD) because the kid in it was so obnoxious, and the woman's masochistic obsession with him was so unbelievable, that I just couldn't swallow any of it. It was so unbelievable that it made me angry, so I ejected the DVD and put it away.

This is a movie, not real life, and as a movie it did not convince me that this character would have done what she did. Her behavior was not believable within the universe of the movie itself, which is what bothered me; and I think it's what bothered KolaDude in the beginning, before this discussion got so mean-spirited and personal.

I don't care whether anybody in real life would do what she did, which has been the substance of every opposing comment since KolaDude's initial post. I care only about this character in this movie, and her behavior just wasn't believable.

KD's mistake, as I see it, was not that he stayed involved in this discussion way too long but that he allowed it to drag him away from the initial, clearly defined point he was making, about the movie's internal unbelievability, into the "real" world outside of the movie. It became an argument about what "real people" would do, not a discussion about the movie itself.

What he, or I, or anybody else who's posted here, or anybody we know or can imagine, would do in Samantha's position is COMPLETELY irrelevant. We are not characters in this movie; Samantha is. The problem is whether Samantha would do it, and my strong initial reaction was, "NO WAY!"

She's beautiful, she's physically and emotionally healthy, she owns a thriving and lucrative business, she has a great apartment in a great part of town. From everything we're shown by the movie, she seems to have no problems at all.

She is not lonely, her "biological clock" is not ticking, she has no neurotic (or healthy) need to mother someone else's child - in short, she has absolutely NO reason for doing what she did. That is ALL the movie shows us, and based on that information, which is all we really have, what she does is completely unbelievable.

Remember, she's a character in a movie, she's NOT like us, and movie characters who look and live and act like her DO NOT DO what she did. That's all that matters. It's irrelevant what we or anybody else might do in a similar situation.

So I agree 100% with everything KD said until he let the pitbulls attacking him drag him away from the movie into personal opinions about what real people would do in such a situation.

There is no way to win an argument like that, because everybody's opinion is different. But more importantly here, on this message board, those opinions have nothing to do with this movie.

Now I'm going to explain why I ended up loving this movie anyway, despite the fact that I agree completely with KolaDude's view that Samantha's behavior is totally unbelievable.

I came back to this movie a month later only because I didn't have another one to watch, and I'd mostly forgotten how frustrating it had been the first time. I came in when the kid is in the restaurant kitchen with his father, about a third of the way into the movie.

I think it helped a lot that I already knew who everybody was and how they were involved with each other, but I hadn't just been seriously offended by repeated examples of the kid's obnoxiousness and her unbelievable response to it. In a way I was watching with fresh eyes, with a clean emotional plate, and my experience this time was completely different.

Samantha was out of the picture, just a vague memory after my month away; I had only the boy and his father to watch, and they just blew me away - especially the boy. Suddenly, instead of a monster, I saw a sweet, lost child, trying really, really hard to be good, to be helpful even, trying to win back the only family he had ever had.

THAT's what pulled the whole movie together for me and completely undid all the damage the beginning's unbelievability had done before. Through some magic of writing or direction or acting (although it's hard to believe that kid was just reciting lines he'd memorized) I saw the inside of a character whose obnoxious outside was all I had seen before then.

From then on, I had that character in my heart, and no amount of obnoxious behavior from him could tear him back out. I didn't know him personally any better than Samantha did, but I loved him, so I understood perfectly now why she did what she did.

As long as I was watching those two characters from the outside - and that's the only view any of us ever has of any characters in any movie - I could not believe anything Samantha did. But once the Dardennes and Thomas Doret let me see inside Cyril, a view I now can believe Samantha saw as soon as he grabbed onto her in the doctor's office, I believed it all.

I don't need to know any more about Samantha now, because I know Cyril; and if I can respond that strongly to a character on a TV screen, I have no trouble believing she would respond the same way to him in person.

So, KolaDude, if you're still out there, do me a favor and give it another try. Do what I did and skip the first half hour or so, jump in at 29:15, when Cyril's father is locking the door right after Samantha walked away. Try to forget everything you remember, and for sure try to forget the hateful words posted here, and just watch the boy.

As soon as Samantha reappears, back up and watch the two guys alone again. If after that you still hate this movie, then fine. I understand completely, and I respect your position.