This movie forgot to be uplifting.

I think that many people with drug use in their history do not have uplifting tales to tell.

I thought the movie was good at telling the tale of someone who needs to forgive and to accept life as a string of experiences and not the grand plan we think of it as young adults. Just be

Agreed. I think you're supposed to admire her determination... but although it was a great achievement, she wasn't put under pressure by anyone but herself (and the memory of her mother, I suppose, but that is every bit as internal). It was a choice, not a trial.




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"Your mother puts license plates in your underwear? How do you sit?!"

I thought it ended well. She'd completed the walk and worked through her issues. There was a sort of spoken epilogue about her later marriage and children. I didn't need to see the happy times.

You're supposed to get the uplifting part by listening to her narration over the ending scene on the bridge, where she says that nine years later she has a good marriage to a good man, and two children.

The trouble is, that part feels rushed and like an afterthought. Suddenly she's standing on that bridge at the end of her hike, and suddenly we are listening to her saying that nine years later life is rosy and settled and filled with love.

It doesn't seem like enough, so I agree with you about that much. She DOES have a happy, uplifting outcome to her life, but in this film I don't feel that happy ending is represented strongly enough to give we the viewers that sense also.

I think we should have been shown scenes from that future she eventually found, just like we were shown flashback scenes. We should have seen a flashforward scene at the end -- it would have made a nice bookend.

It is actually an ultimately uplifting film but I kind of agree that it actually needed showing not just telling, one of the tenets of good literary writing and good filmmaking also.

Unfortunately, the film left out just about everything that made the book great. There's a lot of gems of wisdom for people fighting against themselves to find themselves that are totally absent in the film. In fact, I'd think that if someone seen the film without reading the book they'd either be lost or frustrated with the pacing of the film. It seems that only the seedier side of the events made it onto the screen. I at least hope some people find the book through the film.