Review: ‘Fireflies in the Garden’
"Fireflies in the Garden" is a movie you want to give a hug, jostle its hair, and tell it that everything's going to be OK. Though made with thoughtful care and sensitively acted, this drama about family dysfunction and grieving is the sort that pops up now and again, and unfortunately writer-director Dennis Lee doesn't have much new to say about the terrain he covers. Everybody in the movie looks appropriately dour and reflective, but the film is so polite it fades away from memory while you're watching it.
"Fireflies," which had its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in 2008, stars Ryan Reynolds as Michael, a novelist who's come home for the college graduation of his mother (Julia Roberts) who had to put aside her studies to focus on raising a family with her English professor husband Charles (Willem Dafoe). Just about everyone in the family has a complicated relationship with everyone else, which for Michael extends to his estranged wife (Carrie-Anne Moss) and his mother's much younger sister (Emily Watson), with whom he shared an intense (though not romantic) emotional relationship as kids. But, because this is one of those sorts of movies, a tragedy happens early on in "Fireflies" that causes everyone to reassess their connections to one another.
Lee won much attention because of his award-winning 2003 short "Jesus Henry Christ," and "Fireflies" is his feature debut. But despite a pretty impressive cast, the movie languished in release limbo, although it did open in some other countries. That long delay probably creates the impression that "Fireflies" is an unwatchable fiasco, but the resulting film -- which is 10 minutes shorter than the 98-minute cut shown in Berlin -- is less a disaster than just a muted, only rarely affecting curiosity. Lee was inspired to make the film after his mother's death, but that sadness doesn't translate into anything particularly insightful on screen. Without meaning to diminish the anguish her passing no doubt brought to Lee, let it be said that "Fireflies" feels like a rather generic run-through of the sort of family angst familiar to audiences of Hollywood melodramas and autobiographical indie dramas. (For instance, it will probably not shock you that the movie's title is, in fact, the name of the book that Michael is working on.)
Still, Lee is helped out immensely by a cast that infuses these predictable characters with real feeling. Between "Green Lantern" and "The Change-Up," Reynolds has had a brutal year commercially, but in serious mode here he more than capably displays the anger and regret of a man who has been unable to fully escape childhood misery through his writing life. And though they're underused, Watson and Ioan Gruffudd (as a family friend) do a good job negotiating the movie's walking-on-eggshells tone that oscillates between scenes of melancholy confession and angry recriminations. Hayden Panettiere believably portrays Watson's character in the film's flashbacks, and Moss brings a weathered beauty to her role, although she's dropped from the proceedings almost as quickly as she's introduced.
And, really, that's the movie's problem in a nutshell. You can't really say anything too terrible about its delicate performances -- or anything else, for that matter -- but Lee has laced "Fireflies in the Garden" with conventional "surprises" and trite revelations that are so musty they deaden everything in their path. Once again we learn that sometimes dads can be cruel to their sons and that our parents aren't as simple as we imagine them to be. There's something to be said for a teary family drama that has the good manners not to be histrionic, but the movie's minor-key atmosphere can only take it so far. To prepare for their roles, everyone in "Fireflies" seems to be on downers. You don't leave the film feeling enlightened or moved. More likely, you'll just feel drowsy.
Grade: C
