Absolutely amazing

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

One question kept coming up while watching this. Why on Earth pay for so capable actors and then waste them on clumsy adaptation and catastrophic direction. We are talking Paul Newman, Robin Wright and Helen Hunt in one place, which will never happen again, and even Ed Harris is too good for this production.There is a reason why writers who don't write cinematic novels are normally nor allowed to write adaptations of their own work - they are in love with their own writing and turn a movie into an audio book.That's exactly what happened here. Long, unwieldy scenes with a narrator essentially reading the book and footage serving as a mere illustration. Doesn't HBO have anyone to review this stuff and keep sending it back to square one till it actually becomes cinematic. It even spells out book chapters and has things like "this will be in the latter chapter" which is plain pathetic.Good director can usually rectify this kind of mess but Fred Schepisi has shown such ineptitude that's it's painful to watch how he stumbles, neglects character development and uses multiple copies of prior sequences to the point that it becomes annoyingly noticeable. He also seems to be incapable to compose sequences of the right length to convey sub-plots. He either makes them ridiculously long and boring, all the way to having the book being read into your face, or he cuts them short, doesn't finish the park and makes the final cut look random.Particularly annoying aspect is that he doesn't have the first clue how to visually separate scenes that are long memories serving as sub plots from flashbacks (short and dramatic) and from the main/present scenes. They are all just equally flat, not even a change in the lighting or set decor to depict two different times.

Its pretty obvious that the author wrote the screenplay here... given that his pontificating prose makes the transition to the film as voice-over narration. Come to think of it... I didn't see a credit for the narrator, and I didn't recognize the goofy voice either... I wonder if this guy could possibly be THAT self-indulgent.Anyway, this movie is OK. I'd say about half the scenes are good and half are bad. It's pretty inconsistent in its level of phony-ness.It is overall an interesting and engaging story, but I think it is greatly hindered by the cheap crutch of a purely evil character.Hoffman and Robin Wright Penn were both really good in the flash backs. William Fichtner struck me as the only guy who carried his weight in the modern scenes. Dennis Farina was good, but it was a one note job.The glove box and the cat were painful.I have to say, my jaw about hit the floor when a lowered newspaper revealed Josh Lucas in a cameo as a young Paul Newman... it was a brief but unbelievable scene.

Excellent production--great cast, director, cinematography, etc., all in aid of making a superior soaper. Will the mean old rich lady get her comeuppance? (organ chord) Will Milt find out who his *real* father is? (organ chord) Will Becky and Ralph get back together again? (organ chord)Tossing in a Columbine-type element doesn't add the "contemporary" touch that the writer hoped would elevate this beyond soap. Without it, all that would be missing would be the Palmolive ads; with it, we just get the heavy hand of nastiness.Several have mentioned Nobody's Fool (a truly great movie) as a parallel, but that's like comparing King Lear with Days of Our Lives.

As an acting smörgåsbord, few films of the last year compare to Empire Falls. And I mean Smorgasbord in the sense that not everything is of the same quality, but, damn, sometimes bounty is its own reward. Ed Harris is an actor who only ever plays a few notes in a film, and you have to go back over the films to see the breadth of his talent. Paul Newman seems to have gone out of his way to pick a role that expanded his body of work, but there are some scenes where you see the mechanism creaking. Helen Hunt takes a giant leap away from her solid and likable safe zone into the most unlikable and outrageous character in a film of unlikable and outrageous characters and somehow makes the character both the most real and sympathetic. She seems like an actor poised for artistic greatness, if only there were any roles out there for her to sink her teeth into.