The Safety of Objects (2001)

Bad idea

This film has a great cast but what a waste of talent! The individual short stories are artlessly scrambled together with disastrously fragmented results.

Trying to film A.M. Homes's fiction must be like trying to film a bunch of Peanuts comic strips by separating & shuffling the individual panels. The rhythm & pace of the originals are gone & in their place we get a bunch of scenes out of a very mediocre soap opera.

Each episode, each character needs total focus, the reader/audience's complete attention. Everything is happening INSIDE the characters. This movie demolishes any possibilty of that ever happening. On the page the boy who falls in love with Barbie (A Real Doll) is priceless. On the screen he's pretentious & unbelievable, a kid doing schtick.
November 6, 2005

Ambitious puzzle of the human nature!

This a film that must be watched at multiple layers. You can figure out a multidimensional prism, where every face deals with a particular character and diverse approach about the existence's hard reality The impressive edition work and the increasing rhythmic tension can be imagined as frame that progressively shrinks and eventually struggles to every member of those four families whose lives are interweaved.
The dramatic reality evasion experienced by the isolated young boy with his Barbie doll goes beyond a simple metaphor; the miscommunication between father and sons are explicitly shown: the TV as Marshall Mc Luhan stated once, works out as the XX Century babysitter; in the other hand we have a mother breathes loneliness in its purest state. She is in good shape and is powerfully attracted by men much younger than her.
Close plays perhaps, the sharpest and painful role, dealing with her son in vegetative state, and her daughter who has true nightmares with a terrible secret you that will be revealed at the end.
The complex narrative structure is not any obstacle for the viewer, due the life is precisely on this way; an unpredictable, voluntary and randomness events chain.
In the other hand we have a surreptitious statement about the futility of material goods as one of the story's multiple dramatic basis; the amazing fact to maintain your hands on a car during three consecutive days just to guarantee a huge audience is a hard critic to some reality shows, and so the traveling around the market journey to carve in relief some unusual behavior patterns consumer.
The cast was simply extraordinary.
A winner, though may be a not easy going watch film for some viewers.
August 13, 2005

Derailed not Destroyed

Individuals in four handsome suburban families are coming undone; the causes are diverse -- the trauma of a tragic accident, a divorce, a missed promotion, a growing apart in a long-standing marriage. Yet, gradually, instead of spinning out of control a la the much overpraised American Beauty, the individuals here do what most of us do when hit hard by life, they crawl back on course and, bruised but alive, move on. For that reason, Safety of Objects rings much truer than AB. I wonder if that could be because Safety is a movie made by, and largely about, women rather than driven by narcissism. Be that as it may, The Safety of Objects has its bizarre -- a radio station SUV promotional stunt -- and creepy -- particularly the quasi-kidnapping that dominates much of its last quarter -- moments. But in the end people make the right decisions and director Troche brings together a nicely crafted final scene where new neighbors are welcomed with gifts of the Objects and those we have watched for two hours again begin to risk intimacy with their closest family members. All in all, not a great movie, but very watchable, with Patricia Clarkson stealing the show as she almost always does. May 19, 2005

Squeezing the Cliche for All It Is Woth.

From the outset, I must say that this film is bizarre. I must also say that, despite the fact that I liked it enough to give it three stars, you have seen this film before. Where? It is the same type of suburban-angst-gone-haywire plot you've seen in such films as American Beauty. If that is your sort of film, then this is your sort of film. If that is not your cup of tea, then this will not be either.

The film is the story of 4 suburban families who have much more in common than first blush would tell you. All of them are somehow intertwined with a the fate of one of the families' comatose sons. (One character was in the car that injured him, another was the boys lover, etc.) It is the story, then, of how each family copes in different ways with that, and a host of other suburbanesque goings on, like being passed up for a promotion, dealing with the possible kidnapping of a daughter, or fumbling, as an adolescent, through one's first sexual feelings.

While the film, as I've said before, takes bizarre (and often unrealistic) twists and turns in the manner of American Beauty, "The Safety of Objects" has a strangely likeable quality. Like "American Beauty," the characters and story lines are just quirky enough to grab you without being so strange as to let you go. None of the characters are overtly lovable or dispicable, but all of them are at the very least, interesting and at most, compelling.

Be that as it may, though, the film is still a bit too cliche to be of any but moderate interest. Too many films - American Beauty, Short Cuts, The Good Girl, etc. - portray the same type of 'off-the-deep-end' suburban situations that this film does better, and more convincingly, than this film does it.

In fact, it is disappointing to find out that this film is based on a collection of short stories by author A.M. Holmes, because another film called "Short Cuts" is the same idea, only involving the stories of Raymond Carver. And just as Carver is a superior writer to Holmes, "Short Cuts" is heads-and-tails superior to "The Safety of Objects."

But if you like suburbia-gone-angry-and-awry films like "American Beauty," then this film is at least worth one viewing. After all, cliches are called cliches becuase they work at least well enough to be cliches. January 30, 2005

Despite the Bad Reviews, I Loved It!!!

I absolutely loved this movie and highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't yet seen it. It's a wonderful collage of several suburban families who are somehow linked together although the reason is not revealed until the very end of the movie. Do yourself a favor and ignore the bad reviews and try it for yourself. January 2, 2005

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