Stockholm Pennsylvania (2015) How do we hate this movie?
Let us count the ways.....
No, let's not. It's a massive waste of time to spend more than a minute or two on this cinema atrocity.....
Here's the epitome of film festival Culture-Vulture madness....
A soul deadening, pretentious piece of excrement whose makers were so puffed up with their own importance, it made them oblivious to this cold hard fact......
.......that the film fails to realize its lofty intentions so badly, with such wrong-headed incompetence, that it renders itself unwatchable, unfit for human consumption.
No question, its central idea promises a strong gut-wrenching examination of two damaged souls, each terribly wronged by the cruelest of fates.....
......and then proceeds to drop the ball at every opportunity, depending on its two superb lead actresses to make an audience think they're watching a fully thoughtful, thought-out film.
But they're not. Not a thousand miles close.....
22 year old Leia (Saoirse Ronan) has been rescued from 18 years of basement captivity. At age four, a malignant loon named Ben (Jason Issacs) abducted her from a playground and raised her completely isolated from the outside world.
With Ben jailed, Leia's reunited with her parents Marcy and Glen (Cynthia Nixon, David Warshofsky), who haven't laid eyes on her since she was a toddler.
While David can only stand by clueless and befuddled, Marcy's lifetime of emotional agony only gets worse. Leia remains a monsosyllabic stranger to her, like an otherwordly alien trying to cope with a strange envirionment and even stranger people she's never known....her biological parents. Her memories gravitate to the comfort and security she knew with Ben.
Yes, the setup sounds intriguing and if filmmakers with any semblance of talent were involved, this could've made for a compelling, riveting experience.
But not writer-director Nikole Beckwith, who slows the proceedings down to an excruciating crawl.......every so often there are momentary flashes of perceptive clarity, but you'd need to guzzle gallons of strong coffee to stay awake for them.
Then, during the film's final third, it goes so crazily off the rails, you can only gape at it in stunned disbelief.....
Nixon's Marcy, driven mad by Leia's disconnection to her, throws Glen out of the house and imprisons Leia, feeding her carefully scheduled portions of food and water. So once again, Leia finds herself held captive, only this time for reasons she can't begin to fathom.
None of this looks or sounds real and it gets worse. Leia easily escapes and then the film pulls a pathetic, desperate Hail Mary pass to make an audience think it's relevant and controversial......
Leia's seen sitting on a park bench, watching a little girl and contemplating an abduction of a child all her own. Ugh......and double ugh......a climax that only come from someone who knows nothing about the subject of their film.....
Fit only for Film Festival Culture-Vultures......for everyone else, Zero stars. (0).
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