Birmingham Post
March 12, 2004
By Mike Davies

A clever, well drawn out idea is let down by lack of emotional involvement, stilted performances and an overheated last act in Mehdi Norowzian's good looking literary drama as two parallel stories gradually coalesce.

While serving 15 years for murder, taciturn Steven (Joseph Fiennes) received an open letter from a young schoolboy and began corresponding with him and turning the letters into a novel. Now, released from prison, he finds work and accommodation at a cheap motel cum diner, completing his book and trying to keep out of trouble.

Which may not be easy given the place is co-owned with benevolent Bible following Vic (Sam Shepard) by psychotic Horace (Dennis Hopper riffing on his Blue Velvet turn) who takes daily pleasure in menacing the world-weary waitress (Deborah Kara Unger).

Meanwhile, back in the other plot, some 18 years earlier, having had revenge sex with the decorator mistakenly believing her husband was cheating on her, academic's wife Mary Bloom (Elizabeth Shue) gives birth on the night husband and young daughter are killed in a car crash.

Consumed with guilt and believing the boy, whom she names Leopold after Joyce's Ulysses, to be the product of her adultery, she resents and ignores him as she sinks into alcoholism and an abusive relationship with aforementioned handyman. One day, as part of a school assignment, Leo writes a letter to a man in prison.

If you've read Joyce's novel, all the clues as to where this is going are glaringly obvious and even if you haven't it's not hard to see there's more to the connection between the boy and the man than the narrative suggests. A pity then that, overburdened with symbolic imagery and hampered by respectively opaque and excessive performances from Fiennes and Hopper, it becomes increasingly unconvincing (not least with one of the cast attempting to play an 18 year old) and less compelling as it heads for its limply cathartic denouement.