Gale Cady Williams

I really, really hated this movie. It is pretentious and condescending and makes the enormous error of casting my personal favorite actor of all time, Tom Hanks, as a bad guy throughout most of the eras of the film, which not only was horrible miscasting, but just plain made me angry. Hear ye, hear ye, Hollywood: Tom Hanks is a hero, and no one wants to see him as an evil pirate or any other sort of bad guy. N-O ! He is Joe vs. the Volcano, The big little boy in BIG; he is Sully, or a Vietnam war hero or an Apollo astronaut or a castaway who defeats nature and all odds, or an adorable foreign jazz fan who’s stuck in an airport for a year, or the Everyman hero, Larry Crowne. What is he not? A BAD GUY. Seriously, do not mess with me and my adoration of Tom Hanks! I hated Cloud Atlas!!

Poignant reminder of what we all value, what we are working for, and why. Frances McDoormand turns in a beautifully quiet performance as a woman who becomes homeless, living out of her van in Nevada after losing her husband, her job and her home. Eye opening and touching.

*Spoiler alert * In reading others’ reviews, it is clear that there are a lot of people out there who are clueless about this film, unable to rise to the challenge to decipher a film that is clearly not science fiction, but the beautiful delusions of a man tormented by severe hallucinations and delusional schizophrenia. At the beginning of the film, we see a man on the verge of a mental breakdown, desperately trying to renew his prescription, unable to do so, and we see that he knows he is about to lose his job. We follow along with him in his separation from reality at that point, but the director keeps showing us the real world via Wilson’s daughter, who never gives up on him. The film clearly shows us that as it takes us back and forth between real-world reality and Owen Wilson’s character‘s other-worldly hallucinations. Beliefs in one’s own superpowers and alternate realities are one of the characteristics of this form of schizophrenia. I was happy to see his character able to resolve his drug addiction and mental illness enough at the end to provide us with an ending that gves us hope. I am a long-time fan of Owen Wilson and remember being devastated to learn many years ago of his attempted suicide. I think Wilson the actor, having come out on the other side of this, understands the torments of a mind that is muddied by addiction and grief, and his performance is beautiful, powerful, and heartbreaking. Salma Hayek turns in a very strong performance as the homeless woman [if she is real - there are many signs that she is a Sixth Sense/Bruce Willis type character] who lures him to join her in her delusions, which are even more profound than his, and the two of them join in shared hallucinations on mind-altering crystals that may not be drugs at all; the characters may only believe that they are drugs. This movie is extremely beautiful, visually, and well-acted by Wilson, Hayek, and Nesta Cooper, the young actress who plays his daughter. Give it a chance. It's worth the watch. This is not the Matrix; it is an illustration of mental illness.