I too loved the film.
But unfortunately I can imagine all too well if I were a critic on deadline, wanted a 'broad hint' about which general direction to look, and found the description below on the distributor's website, I too would write something inane like 'he did a poor job of telling the story'. I'd certainly never get even a glimmer of an idea about 'ballet' from this:
Neil (Ben Affleck) is an American traveling in Europe who meets and falls in love with Marina (Olga Kurylenko), an Ukrainian divorcee who is raising her 10-year-old daughter Tatiana in Paris. The lovers travel to Mont St. Michel, the island abbey off the coast of Normandy, basking in the wonder of their newfound romance. Neil makes a commitment to Marina, inviting her to relocate to his native Oklahoma with Tatiana. He takes a job as an environmental inspector and Marina settles into her new life in America with passion and vigor. After a holding pattern, their relationship cools.
"Marina finds solace in the company of another exile, the Catholic priest Father Quintana (Javier Bardem), who is undergoing a crisis of faith. Work pressures and increasing doubt pull Neil further apart from Marina, who returns to France with Tatiana when her visa expires. Neil reconnects with Jane (Rachel McAdams), an old flame. They fall in love until Neil learns that Marina has fallen on hard times. Gripped by a sense of responsibility — and his own crisis of faith — he rekindles with Marina after another trip to France. She returns with him to Oklahoma, resuming her American life. But the old sorrows eventually return.
...
I quickly realized the suggestion Marina had some sort of dalliance with Father Quintana was complete hogwash, and in fact the Father Quintana thread stood on its own as another aspect of delving into 'love', rather than being some sort of weird sideshow to Neil and Marina's thread.
(To be fair, the above quotes only the first two paragraphs of Magnolia's three-paragraph description, and the third paragraph threads a better description of the film around the nuts-and-bolts of who made what and when and how ...but who reads that far [or quotes that far]???)
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