A Home at the End of the World is a
2004 drama
film directed by
Michael
Mayer. The screenplay by
Michael
Cunningham was adapted from his
1990 novel of the same
title.
Plot synopsis
The film focuses on a trio of disparate individuals who struggle to
create a family of their own.
Bobby Morrow's (Farrell) life in suburban Cleveland
has been tinged with tragedy since he was a young
boy, losing first his older hippie brother to
a freak accident and then his mother to illness. As a
rebellious teenager, he meets the conservative and gawky Jonathan
Glover in
high school, and he becomes a
regular visitor to the Glover home, where he introduces his friend
- and his mother Alice - to
marijuana and
the music of
Laura Nyro. Bobby and
Jonathan also indulge in adolescent sexual experimentation during
their frequent
sleepovers.
Bobby helps Alice
accept her son's homosexuality, and
she teaches Bobby how to bake, unintentionally setting him on a
career path that eventually takes him to New York City
, where Jonathan is sharing a colorful East
Village
apartment with the bohemian and somewhat older
Clare. Bobby moves in, and the three create their own
household.
Although Jonathan is gay and highly
promiscuous, he is deeply in love with Clare,
who seduces and falls into a relationship with the seemingly
bisexual Bobby. Their romance occasionally
is disrupted by sparks of jealousy between the two men until
Jonathan, tired of being the third wheel, disappears without
warning.
He re-enters their lives when his father Ned
dies and Bobby and Clare travel to Phoenix, Arizona
for the services. The three take Ned's
car back east with them, and impulsively decide to buy a house near
Woodstock, New
York
, where Bobby and Jonathan open and operate a cafe
while Clare raises the baby daughter she and Bobby have
had.
Jonathan discovers what appears to be a
Kaposi's sarcoma lesion on his thigh and, although Bobby tries to
convince him it's simply a bruise, others soon appear.
Clare takes the baby
for what ostensibly is a brief visit to her mother in Philadelphia
, but Bobby and Jonathan accurately suspect she has
no intention of returning and Bobby decides to care for Jonathan
during his last days. On a cold winter day some months
later, they scatter Ned's ashes in the field behind their home, and
Jonathan (who now visually appears to be ill) makes Bobby promise
he will scatter his in the same place following his now inevitable
early death from complications due to
AIDS.
Production
The film
was shot on location in New York City, Phoenix, and Schomberg
and Toronto
in Ontario, Canada
.
The film premiered at the
New York Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and was shown at the
Nantucket Film Festival, the Provincetown International Film
Festival, the
San
Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, and the
Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival
before going into limited release in the US. It grossed $64,728 on
five screens on its opening weekend. It eventually earned
$1,029,872 in the US and $519,083 in foreign markets for a total
worldwide box office of $1,548,955.
Cast
Critical reception
A.O. Scott of the
New York
Times observed, "As a novelist Mr. Cunningham can carry
elusive, complex emotions on the current of his lovely, intelligent
prose. A screenwriter, though, is more tightly bound to conventions
of chronology and perspective, and in parceling his story into
discrete scenes, Mr. Cunningham has turned a delicate novel into a
bland and clumsy film . . . so thoroughly decent in its intentions
and so tactful in its methods that people are likely to persuade
themselves that it's better than it is, which is not very good . .
. The actors do what they can to import some of the texture of life
into a project that is overly preoccupied with the idea of life,
but the mannered self-consciousness of the script and the direction
keeps flattening them into types."
Roger Ebert of the
Chicago Sun-Times said, "The movie
exists outside our expectations for such stories. Nothing about it
is conventional. The three-member household is puzzling not only to
us, but to its members. We expect conflict, resolution, an ending
happy or sad, but what we get is mostly life, muddling through . .
. Colin Farrell is astonishing in the movie, not least because the
character is such a departure from everything he has done
before."
Mick LaSalle of the
San Francisco Chronicle stated,
"What we have here . . . is a movie about a friendship and about
the changing nature of families. We also have a movie about what it
was like to be a child in the late 1960s, a teenager in the
mid-1970s and a young adult in the early 1980s. In these aspects,
the film is sensitive, sociologically accurate and emotionally
true. But the picture is also the story of one character in
particular, Bobby, and when it comes to Bobby,
A Home at the
End of the World is sappy and bogus." He added, "Farrell is
not the first actor anyone would cast as an innocent, and he seems
to know that and is keen on making good. His speech is tentative
but true. His eyes are darting but soulful. The effort is there,
but it's a performance you end up rooting for rather than enjoying,
because there's no way to just relax and watch."
Peter Travers of
Rolling Stone awarded the film three out
of four stars, calling it "funny and heartfelt" and "a small
treasure." He added, "Farrell's astutely judged portrayal . . . is
a career highlight" and "Stage director Michael Mayer (
Side Man) makes a striking debut in
film."
David Rooney of
Variety
called the film "emotionally rich drama" "driven by soulful
performances." He added, "Strong word of mouth could help elevate
this touching film beyond its core audience of gay men and admirers
of the book."
Awards and nominations
The film was cited for Excellence in Filmmaking by the
National Board of
Review and was nominated for the
GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Film
in Wide Release but lost to
Kinsey. Michael Cunningham was nominated
for the
Chlotrudis Award for
Best Adapted Screenplay, Dallas Roberts was nominated for the
Gotham Award for Breakthrough
Performance, and Colin Farrell was nominated for the
Irish Film Award for Best
Actor.
See also
References
- BoxOfficeMojo.com
- New York Times review
- Chicago Sun-Times review
- San Francisco Chronicle review
- Rolling Stone review
- Variety review
External links
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