One way to appreciate this movie more....

I know this sounds obvious, but from some of the critiques here, it seems these complainers fail to view this film through a sort of historical lens when it comes to masculinity, especially when it comes to the types of characters in this movie and their roles in society.

For one thing, this film is about masculinity and the concept of masculinity, and from the start, one way to enhance the impact of this movie is to imagine it from 1925 and before and consciously make that sort of viewing lens of observation, while keeping in mind how masculinity was viewed back then and what it meant when it came to the affections of men toward other men whether homosexual affections or just heterosexual affections such as mentoring and kin to kin and friend to friend and worker to worker.

As someone else also pointed out, this film has to be watched carefully close because EVERYTHING means something and often portends to what is going to follow.

For example, I sort of missed the importance of when the son tells the mother that it is his job to keep her happy and safe and just took that as a sort of everyday comment an adolescent makes to a parent.

Going in with the mindset of how little things will be important, especially later, will enhance viewing, as does keeping in mind historical views of the masculinity of the American male.

(I'm not even going to get into the "toxic male," and homophobia of some commentators because most of them are being done in an immature and thoughtless rambling of silliness. Frankly, it is bizarre to me how so many homophobes even watched this when all the advanced publicity sort of mentioned the homosexual angle prior to the movie being aired.)