Writer-Director Alexander Payne, writer/director of Sideways, once again discovers the human element in storytelling. Normal lives caught in extreme emotional circumstances, dealing with making choices we can never prepare for.
George Clooney's character, Matt King, is constantly put in positions of making choices he'd rather not make. He must make choices forced upon him when his desire is to keep the status quo if he's to survive, now that his wife is lying comatose in a hospital. Choices - Matt's eldest daughter, a teenager, insists her crude (boy)friend be around at all times during the hardship of pulling the life support lines from his hospitalized spouse, when all he'd like to do is toss the kid out on his ear; Or make the decision of selling pristine virgin land in Kauai that's been in his family for century's to developers who have unsettling ideas for its future with the personal trade off being millions for him and his brothers-sisters-cousins-uncles and on vs keeping it in the family somehow to be kept pristine; Or whether or not to confront his wife's paramour exposing that family to the husbands extra marital trysts vs not doing it. It's one compromise after another in almost every instance throughout the film. It's fascinating to watch this and to see how Matt keeps all things juggled and balanced while trying to get to know his two daughters he has been estranged from because he has lived his married life as the working provider who was never at home to know who they are.
The actors in this film are spot on. The direction is simple and clean. The writing superb.
Bring the crying tissues, you're going to need them. This film is laugh out loud funny one moment and brutally touching the next.
This is the discovery of a family underneath the harsh conditions it set upon itself pre wife's injury that must be undone in order for the family to survive and Clooney delivers a knockout performance in making it happen.
George Clooney's character, Matt King, is constantly put in positions of making choices he'd rather not make. He must make choices forced upon him when his desire is to keep the status quo if he's to survive, now that his wife is lying comatose in a hospital. Choices - Matt's eldest daughter, a teenager, insists her crude (boy)friend be around at all times during the hardship of pulling the life support lines from his hospitalized spouse, when all he'd like to do is toss the kid out on his ear; Or make the decision of selling pristine virgin land in Kauai that's been in his family for century's to developers who have unsettling ideas for its future with the personal trade off being millions for him and his brothers-sisters-cousins-uncles and on vs keeping it in the family somehow to be kept pristine; Or whether or not to confront his wife's paramour exposing that family to the husbands extra marital trysts vs not doing it. It's one compromise after another in almost every instance throughout the film. It's fascinating to watch this and to see how Matt keeps all things juggled and balanced while trying to get to know his two daughters he has been estranged from because he has lived his married life as the working provider who was never at home to know who they are.
The actors in this film are spot on. The direction is simple and clean. The writing superb.
Bring the crying tissues, you're going to need them. This film is laugh out loud funny one moment and brutally touching the next.
This is the discovery of a family underneath the harsh conditions it set upon itself pre wife's injury that must be undone in order for the family to survive and Clooney delivers a knockout performance in making it happen.
Top Box Office
- 1.$116.6M
- 2.$20.7M
- 3.$11.0M
- 4.$9.6M
- 5.$8.3M
- 6.$7.1M
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- 8.$6.3M
- 9.$4.1M
- 10.$3.0M