Very well executed

Charming and brutal

an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH !!! Well .. now we can talk ..Despite my hatred for the shown type of human (Hedda Amerson/Robin Wright Penn) as a tenderhearted girl whom never turns to seek revenge on the man whom she loved even though he drove her to committing suicide (2 times !) as his first wife, and hit his second wife to the extent that he paralyzed her !!, and then hit his third wife till he killed her !!! And our very good-natured girl just can't even hate him a bit !??? Despite my hatred for that, I hated and hated and hated the way that this story had been told by! The movie tried to be as dissimilar as its main character, so the writer/director (Erin Dignam) didn't put this series of confessions (justifications for her absolute love) as a long sequences in the plot of a psychotherapy's movie but made such a drama with a sense of thrill by transporting it to the courtroom instead of the psychiatrist's room. Yet even by that way this very movie had no way to unite us with whatever it wanted to say, or consolidated its case by anything solid to be at the end a delicate yet fragile movie like its hero or should I say its anti-hero ?! Honestly nothing was cohesive ! The shots were too damn long, the rhythm was deadly slow, the important information came like a few parsimonious drops ! And I just doubt that no artiest in the world wants his audience to fall asleep in front of his work as this one successfully did ! Moreover the main character in herself as forgiveness in a human form was really cold provoker or not convincing. You'll find yourself screaming so many times while watching : this is masochism !.. And it's a crime.. you are the victim in it and the criminal.. so when you acquit such a mean killer and make him back to our society by this too soft, too weeping and too emotional witness then he'll do it again and again.. well lady.. this is a fatal man slayer or at least a disturbed sick person who looks like a loving kind of guy (which makes him more dangerous as a killer) but you're just too blinded by love to see that.. so this is not love.. this is an illness which means that this cute girl is needing help very fast just like her brutal sensitive love !Further than that, look at the character of the lawyer (K.D. Dietrickson/William Hurt) who seemed a good person from the start without even one thing which changes a bit in him at the very end, for better or for worse !? But that's nothing compared to the stupid final scene when he told the girl in great emotional condition : "I've learned from you .. a lot .. but I'll tell you about that .. Later" !!!! As for me this is a very weak scene ! and speaking of which let me tell you eagerly about those 2 dull scenes where she was swimming in the pool ! OH MY GOD.. That wasn't only boring but also a truly pedant piece of work like the movie wants to tell us visually that she is as pure & placid as this water !Over and above, you just find those idiots who applaud and glorify the movie as I dare them all to tell me whatever they learned from it or understood, and even if they could (which I doubt so much) let them be that objective once to tell me, or themselves, what are the defects of their beloved movie ?! The big result of the aforementioned was : a character that makes you ailing, a plot and a style which were both whether feeble to a crappy extent, or pedant to alleged extent, which would put you away from its true well-meaning or its noble message.P.S : the intro scene of (Sean Penn) as the pathetic image which we all turning into without the presence of loving affectionate and tolerant persons like (Hedda Amerson) among us.. that fine scene looked really independent away from the whole movie as the only true perfect thing here, making an ugly irony if you compared it to all what's after it.

I was absolutely fascinated by the story and its characters, mainly Hedda, of course. It was quite a challenge, both intellectually and emotionally, to step in this odd version of love and romantic connection and see the way the characters relate to love and their strange definition and understanding of emotional bonding, which takes extreme, violent turns. What I find striking is that there are many who might identify themselves with Hedda's ex-boyfriend in terms of all that longing for flawless complementing and wholeness with the loved one, however, it is the specific expression of this feeling, as well as a certain healthy state of passivity, that makes the difference and separates people on the safe side of the edge from those on the other side, who fall, hurt and get hurt because they no longer possess an objective sense of what is tangible. When Hedda says: "The table was no longer a table", we may as well understand that her skin was no longer skin, a matter of skin tissues, when his ex was battering her, it may as well have been paper or cotton, and that the pain she was feeling in the process was not actually pain, but equaled love and reaching out for it. So, the limits between concepts like love, pain, sharing and intimacy, and their definitions, as well as the usual adjectives/ stereotypes attached to them get just as fuzzy and confused as the characters. The characters are placed on the scene and left on their own to grow throughout the story and to reveal themselves progressively, quite similar to a canvas painting process. The movie has a beautifully slow, bluesy rhythm, with moving flash-backs and a heart-breaking climax when Hedda makes her final confession regarding her personal feeling of privilege in the context of her ex-lover's violence. Robin Wright Penn makes a terrific job of portraying Hedda as a graceful, pretty fragile and floaty presence of a kind, tender nature, a woman who would have been just a regular person if it hadn't been for her past relationship and the emotional and psychological entanglements derived from it. Her ex is not the bad guy of the story, but a tragic soul who simply doesn't know where to stop and can't conceive drawing lines between the separate selves and territories when loving someone deeply.

It's interesting how depending on the maturity of each viewer, there are so positive and so negative comments at the time. This proves one more time how differently we perceive things. I saw this movie, maybe 3-4 years ago. I must admit, I did not experience any feeling of excitement while watching it, nevertheless it did catch my attention. When it ended the only idea that I was left with was that love is like a drug... if you become addicted ... it can ruin you. Robin's character response to "if you were to go back in time what would you do?" , "I would do everything just the same"... was tattooed to my brain. This story needed to be told and it couldn't have been better told. This is my opinion.

When an abusive man's girlfriend ends up in a wheelchair and another one jumps in front of a car to end her misery, attorney William Hurt decides to bring him to trial. Emotionally-scarred Robin Wright is called to testify at a court hearing against her former lover.Sounds like the beginning of a good courtroom drama, and with a cast that also includes Sean Penn, Joanna Cassidy and Amy Madigan, how can you go wrong?A lot, actually. What we have here is a strong contender for the title of Most Boring Film of the Decade. I honestly can't recall seeing a duller, slower, more sophorific piece of filmmaking. Does director/writer Erin Dignam think real people talk and act like these characters? I'm all for psychological dramas and introspective stories but they have to be somewhat interesting. Even depressing stories can be compelling, but compared to this, Ingmar Bergman's films look like Die Hard meets Rambo. This film is so sleep-inducing, it could be used by dentists as an anesthetic.Don't take my word, see it and judge for yourself. But make sure you have plenty of coffee available, or you may never reach the end with your eyes open.