Fireflies in the Garden, directed by Dennis Lee
This is a flawed attempt at the great American family drama. Michael, a wrider living in New York, loses his mother in a car accident just before a family reunion in the sticks: meeting his aunt Jane and her children and reliving the memories of his troubled childhood helps him reconcile with those around him. Unsurprisingly for a film about a wrider coming home and about to publish a semi-autobiographical novel, Dennis Lee's screenplay is itself semi-autobiographical – and very, very emotional. If you're at that time of life when sensitive young men begin to “come to terms” with their childhoods, or if you're a fan of loss, bonding and moving on stories, then you'll love it. If you find that sort of thing cloying then it will feel much longer than an hour and a half, because it lays it on thick as peanut butter.
The performances are reasonable, with Willem Dafoe making a decent fist of the confusing father's role, Ryan Reynolds and Emily Watson fine as Michael and Jane, and Cayden Boyd very good as young Michael. I was disappointed by Julia Roberts, though, who was going through the motions as the unfeasibly saintly mother. The film is well photographed and mixes some good composition (in the opening sequence for instance, and during Michael's rooftop conversation with Kelly) with a family video feel, some of the flashbacks rendered in a golden-red light reminiscent of home movies – but Lee's direction is mostly workmanlike and the mix of techniques results in a lack of coherent visual style. His script is the main weakness, though, with weird dialogue at times, one painful attempt at humour combined with Hollywood-style hyperpassionate sex, and some unbelievable character interaction – you just don't understand Michael's forgiveness of his father, why pregnancy heals all or why all the emotional work of this family takes place over a few days. The film has been severely cut since it was shown at Berlin last year, and rightly so. It's an ambitious, flawed film, sentimental, clichéd and manuscript-burningly young.
Have your say - join the discussion