The opening scene: You are watching, from behind, a man jogging in the winter all bundled up in sweats, with his hood pulled up around his face. He is jogging. And jogging. It appears to twilight because it is so dismal looking. Finally after many hills and turns, he appears to be jogging towards you, through a large shadow and under an overpass. He stops awkwardly, stumbles, grabs his chest and falls.
Click here to see the rest of this review...
Ten years later the movie turns to an elegant engagement party at Anna's (Nicole Kidman) mother's (Lauren Bacall) townhouse. As guests arrive we see a young boy sitting on a bench in the lobby, not really paying attention to them. Clara arrives (Anne Heche) visibly distraught. She keep mumbling about the present missing its bow. She leaves the building and ends up in a park setting where she is stumbling about and finally ends up burying the gift beneath a pile of decaying leaves.
Several days later, Sean (Cameron Bright) shows up at Anna's mother's birthday party. All he keeps telling people is that he must speak to Anna. She is visibly intrigued. Once he pulls her away from the group, he informs her that he is Sean, her dead husband. She is taken aback and makes Sean leave.
Through out the course of the movie there are peculiar scenes, but the two most on my mind are the two that gave it its R rating. The first is between Anna (Nicole Kidman) and her fiance Joseph (Danny Huston). It is supposed to be the two of them making love. Well, if Anna looked any more enthused, she would have been dead herself. It was gross. All you could see was Joseph's "humping" Anna, full butt shot on him (yuck) and half a breast on her with her legs sort of flopping out on the sides of his butt (another yuck). The other scene involves Anna and 10 year old Sean. Anna is in the tub (all pasty white) and Sean disrobes and joins her. Anna never asks him what he is doing until he is already in the tub! Not only was this scene unnecessary, but made no sense. Both scenes could definitely have been deleted and left on the director's floor.
I don't want to write any more about the plot, because there really isn't much more. Clara finds that Sean has the "present" that she buried containing love letters for the "dead" Sean to her and calls his bluff. Is he really Sean or not, you are left to decide.
The review of this Movie prepared by Andi Puntoriero
