echaczyk

Good acting by all those involved, but this movie is so cliche ridden, it makes you think you've seen this all before. Wife goes to rehab leaving husband (Keaton) to fend for himself and his two young children. Problems with aligning his life with the kids and their lives and their school. He meets a gay parent who also has a child in school and has troubles with his marriage. In a drunken moment he hits on Keaton's character. Keaton's older daughter is having and then has a baby. Keaton's art gallery is financially in trouble. All these things weigh on his shoulders but we have seen all these things before. And they get the Disney ending where everyone lives happily ever after.

I never felt invested in this movie or any of the characters. Maybe because I felt it would all work out in the end and everybody would be happy after they all had their cathartic moment of conflict. It all felt like episodes of The Cosby Show or some other family sitcom trying to be cerebral.

Rachel (Emily Blount) can't keep her nose out of other people's business. She passes her old house on a train to a job she no longer has and hasn't had for a year. She can't bear children and her husband divorced her because of this and the fact that she became a stumble-bum drunk. He married a woman who was more stable and did give him a child. But Rachel still has to keep track of him, to the point of stalking him and the neighbors. She drowns her sorrows in alcohol and seems to blackout often which makes for clichéd story telling. You've seen this amnesia plot point so many times in movies and it isn't any original here.

Rachel hears that the babysitter of her ex-husband's baby is missing and then later found dead. With all of her past stalking and blackouts, Rachel tries to solve the murder and most importantly, try to exonerate herself. With the limited amount of suspects and an even smaller list of motives, it wasn't hard to figure out who the killer was.

This movie, at 1 hour 52 minutes is 22 minutes too long. At times, because of the lingering facial shots and the stupid looks on the actor's faces, I started hating this movie, especially Emily Blount's character, Rachel. At every turn of the plot, she was sticking her nose into other people's business, and usually in a drunken state. Imagine if Columbo was a drunk who staggered and passed out frequently, and was trying to solve a crime. It sounds funny but this movie wasn't played for laughs.

This would have been a better movie if Rachel had witnessed a murder from the window of the train and then tried to convince others that it had happened while avoiding being killed by the murderer. But that would have been a Hitchcockian movie.