Shadows on the Wall
October 25, 2002
Review by Rich Cline

There's an artful style to this literary drama that keeps us involved up until a rather overwrought final act. Two parallel stories run through the film: One is set in the 1960s, with young mother Mary (Shue) stunned after her husband and daughter tragically die. Soon afterwards she gives birth to a boy she names Leopold Bloom, after a character in James Joyce's Ulysses. But Mary just can't cope with life in any way and Leo (Sweat) is left to grow up on his own. Meanwhile, we watch a modern-day story about a just-released prisoner named Stephen (Fiennes) trying to put his life back together, working in a diner with the kindly Vic (Shepard) and the psychotic Horace (Hopper), who menaces the waitress (Unger) and brings up issues from Stephen's past.

The two stories start to merge early on- we can see a connection and it isn't too difficult to predict how they will intersect at the end. Director Norowzian and cinematographer Zubin Mistry film with an assured and fluid style, obviously influenced by Sam Mendes/Conrad Hall. It looks gorgeous, and the editing between the two strands is coherent and ingenious, contrasting the sunny domesticity of Mary's early life with Stephen's more impressionistic experience and then Mary's descent into paranoia, guilt and, of course, alcoholism. It's intriguing and extremely enticing, with symbolic gusts of wind and shafts of light showing the emotional impact of various events. And the cast is good at drawing us in as well. Then the story starts circling around, coming together in a rather obvious way, with one disastrous bit of miscasting (saying who would ruin the big twist). The plot becomes less and less convincing on several levels, losing credibility as the filmmaking gets far too pretentious, dragging until we get to one of those forced movie epiphanies that doesn't really mean anything. Sigh.

2 1/2 stars

[cert 15tbc] adult themes and situations, violence, language