a tight study of crime, personality & family dynamics
i'm watching this and enjoying it quite a bit.
as is too often the case, a witty artfully done film has a low imdb rating.
I really enjoyed it until that bonkers ending with the army reserve brother coming in and “saving” the day and the DA getting in the car accident. Too much resolved by dumb luck. The filicide was a bummer and so not a small crime. Overall enjoyable movie kinda wish the protagonist won in the end. Gary Cole was great as usual.
shareall the chaos went to show what a charmingly destructive shitheel the main character was.
his folks had a bead on him.
Did they though?
The Mum was on his case right from the beginning. Now he had some of it coming sure and he obviously had no issues lying to her.
But she had no issues lying to him either.
The guy did his time. Gets out and gets attacked, told he needs to kill someone or he is screwed, told he needs to kill the other guy, doesn’t because he actually doesn’t want to kill him, gets told if he doesn’t sort it out his parents are dead, tries to sort it so no one dies, shit goes wrong so he wants to bail, then his mum holds him up because she took his money. It may have been dirty money but it was his and she wanted him gone, sooooo why not give it to him and get him to leave? If that had happened he likely would have been shot and yeah problem gone. But she gets shot. Then when he wants it over and again just to leave his gf decides to kill the guy, which gets her killed and almost gets him killed. Then he finally says he is going to leave and be done with it and his dad kills him.
He was just a guy who couldn’t escape his past. But at the same time he wasn’t completely evil, he wiped the knife clean and put his own prints on it to protect his dad.
He knew he had done wrongs and was paying for them. All the chaos came from a past he couldn’t escape from. But he was now in a time to escape from it as literally everyone who wanted him dead or could hurt him was dead. Yet his dad kills him. Because his Mum got shot. Which seems to have actually been Phil’s fault as he told that guy what really happened and the guy snapped and took revenge.
Again this was all stuff from his past. Something his mother would not let go of and was set to treat her son like he could never change. Which just pushed him away further. His dad finally had a chat with him and he was ready to just bail. His mother though prevents that because she wanted to have the moral high ground.
Really no one in the movie was really innocent. They all made bad mistakes.
that's where i was going with this, and where i think the writers wanted us to, until i saw how he cold-bloodedly set up that home-care nurse to do his dirty work, and how little it seemed to bother him after, when she met a horrible end.
remember the opening scene, when he curtly walked out on the priest who evidently had been a support to him? i thought that was telling.
we have to remember that the father also saw him as a destructive person. he just wasn't as vocal about it as the mother.
its a judgement call, but i was left with the impression the writers wanted to wrap this up in such a way that we should conclude there was a lot in the back story we just didn't see, but it added up to consistent pattern, despite his outward charm, his easy-going nature.
or, to conclude the parents were just jerks about keeping him away from his kids. that's a pretty drastic step. you can also recall everyone in town hated his guts, too. i believe he also betrayed his friend, the brother of veteran who went postal.
i liked the half-story well told.
Well argued. I felt mostly sorry for the guy - he was in a hopeless situation from the start to the end. His mum just piled on and made everything worse.
share