The Patron Saint of Liars

This film isn't as useless as many of the reviewers here are writing, in my opinion. I enjoyed it, and I especially fell in love with Clancy Brown's character. He was patient, understanding, loyal, and loving.... he was SO good and believable in this role, it's the one I think of him in the most often now. I believe Clancy is more like this character than any of the others he's played.

No, they didn't explain the lead character's issues or motivations very well, but aren't many people intriguing and inexplicable in some (or many) ways? I think you can enjoy this film if you also pay special attention to the stories and characters around her. Ellen Burstyn is always a first-class actor. All of the supporting cast and characters are rich, interesting, and easy to understand. I enjoyed the movie and I'll watch it again, I'm sure, when I have an opportunity.

Clancy Brown was WONDERFUL. I wanted to marry him myself!

Well, it's a typical, melodramatic chick-flick with overdone performances, the film does have a good cast with Dana Delany, Marisa Ribisi, Ellen Burstyn, and Clancy Brown. Stephen Gyllenhaal's direction isn't bad since he does offer some excellent scenery and poignant moments in the film.

Fans of Maggie though will see her in the 2nd half of the film as a friend of Delany's daughter for about 5-7 minutes in a standout performance as a pregnant teen with multiple ear piercings and bad light blonde dye hair. It's a good film about a woman questioning her Catholic faith while living in a Catholic retreat home for pregnant women while looking for love and understanding.

Recently this movie was on Lifetime. It is about a woman who leaves her husband for no reason when she becomes pregnant. She goes into hiding to give up her child at a convent. The story gives no apparent reason for her running away until the very ending, which makes no sense. She then marries again, while still married to her first husband, to the grounds keeper, Clancy Brown. She decides to keep her baby and lives in a separate home from her husband and child at the convent. Years go by of the couple living apart and the child grows up thinking her mother doesn't love and care for her. Then after a mail incident, her first husband finds her and comes looking for his wife, which of course he is still in love with. Then the story finally unwinds and we find out why this woman runs from her family, which of course is very weak, and leaves the viewer full of questions that are never answered. I watched this whole story to find out the reasoning of a religious event that happens in the first 5 minutes of the movie with a sick child becoming well after a spring of water appears out of the ground, at the very end of the movie the spring appears again, when the lady who runs stops running, I don't see how the 2 relate to the story line that seemed to be full of holes, and how a woman can leave her child and have that child have peace suddenly at the end of the movie is a bit to far fetched for me! I would not waste my time with this movie. One of the worst I have seen.

After reading the Patron Saint of Liars, I could not wait to watch the movie. They ruined it by trying to make a happy ending. The whole point of the book was to show us how some people just can never face life. The reason I loved the book was because for days you thought about Rose, what made her run away from her first life, what made her run away from her second life. You wondered what ever happened to her. This is the problem with Hollywood and why I like Foreign films better. They show life as it really is. Not a neatly tied up ending with, gag me, the healing spring suddenly sprouting forth again, everyone hugging and loving one another again. The book was so much better than the film.

**this review may contain a minor spoiler that is not important to the plot of the movie**

I didn't really get this movie. I couldn't understand the main character and what made her do the things she did. It was an interesting story and I think I was enjoying it as I was watching it, but thinking about it, it didn't really make any sense to me. Why did she run away in the first place? I thought eventually we'd get some sort of backstory like her husband abused her or her father abandoned her or something, you know? But all we find out is that her father died when she was very young. I think they could have taken this whole movie to another level by revealing what made her tick. Why did she keep everybody at a distance? I felt like we should have been able to get inside her head and we were never let in. I also wanted to know the significance of the healing spring. I thought they could have taken that metaphor further. I would have enjoyed the movie more if that were the case.