Fireflies in the Garden

Posted on: 5th June 2009  |

Director: Dennis Lee
Starring: Willem Dafoe, Julia Roberts, Ryan Reynolds,Hayden Panettiere, Emily Watson
UK Release date: 29 May 2009
Certificate: 15 (120 mins)

Fireflies are rather like little stars, aren’t they? Well, they are but they aren’t. That’s the point of Robert Frost’s short poem from which this film takes its title. Re-examining the poem through the camera lens, the film depicts the conflict between expectations and realities, which is where much of the agony in the relationships between parents and their children comes from.

The lead roles in Dennis Lee’s first feature film are a father-and-son duo, Charles Waechter (Willem Dafoe) and Michael Waechter (Ryan Reynolds). You know that trouble is imminent as they share the same profession. They are writers, though of rather different kinds. The elder is a failed literary novelist and university lecturer, while the younger is a successful ‘chick-lit’ writer. The young man has, however, written a serious book, an autobiographical novel that threatens to shed light on the skeletons in the family closet.

The flashback with which the film begins gives you an idea of why the son might desire to take revenge on his father; the genuine awfulness of the father is painfully depicted. Dafoe has brought to life a character more villainous than even the comic book baddies he has previously played.  As a husband and father he is a tyrant, controlling and suffocatingly critical. He simultaneously destroys his son’s esteem by belittling him for not excelling in studies, while expecting much from him when he tells him to perform a self-crafted poem for university colleagues. His loving wife Lisa (an ‘authentic’ and frumpy Julia Roberts) tries her best to limit the damage but is held back by her love for her husband. She is the perfect woman, so much better than her husband that he is always threatened by her goodness, knowing that he does not deserve her love.

With the tensions established effectively and Lisa’s firebrand sister, Jane (played angrily in the flashbacks by Heroes star Hayden Panettiere and in the present day by Emily Watson), introduced, fantastic familial fireworks are eagerly expected. So we expect… and expect… and expect… and, well, instead of the pyrotechnics hoped for, the occasional Roman candle goes off. There is a brilliantly nervous scene where the vegetarian Jane confronts the Charles. She is the oddest sort of vegetarian I have ever seen. She will not eat meat but enjoys blowing up fish with dynamite. She literally ‘blows the fish out of the water’ – but again that metaphor remains unexplored. The shocking revelations never come, but are merely suggested through hints dropped by the present-day characters.

Given the stellar cast, one would expect that for all the flaws in the film’s storytelling, there would at least be some enjoyable acting to make it all worthwhile. And it is very ‘actorly’; there is a lot of  ‘staring into the middle distance’-type acting here. Sadly, the two best actors in the cast, Dafoe and Watson, both put on artificial performances that collide with what is intended to be a naturalistic script. Surprisingly, comedy/action star Reynolds does the best job; he is the most natural and injects some much-needed humour into the film.

But the humour is not well used. Is this a tragedy or a comedy? Or is it aiming for that beautiful modern art form, the ‘dramedy’, perfected by HBO programmes like Six Feet Under and Mad Men? The odd juxtaposition of enjoyable comic scenes and boringly serious dramatic ones mean that the tone of the film is never adequately set. Instead of coherence, we get mood swings.

It is, however, rather attractive. The images are like the photoshopped snaps of a good art student; the grass is greener than green and the skies bluer than blue. When the fireflies finally emerge, the scene is rather reminiscent of a mobile phone provider’s advertisement, with twinkly music to match.

The thematic conclusion of the film is rather different from Frost’s poem. For Frost, the fireflies seem rather pathetic in pretending to be stars, but in this film people seem neither as bad or as good as they are expected to be. Charles, despite some self-destructive behaviour, manages to do well in the work that he does. He is neither the literary genius that his father hopes for, nor the hopeless wreck his father fears. The mother ends up being not as perfect as we thought; the father not as terrible.

The artistic construction of the film on the other hand, does reflect the poem’s theme of unfulfilled prospects. The actors rather better resemble insignificant insects than the stars they are supposed to be. Our expectations for a great cathartic tragedy die out as the film unfolds uneventfully and laboriously. The deepest, darkest answers are never given, as the son burns a copy of his literary expose. If this mirroring between the poem and the film is deliberate, then I can see how that might be clever. In terms of enjoyment and artistic value, however, Fireflies in the Garden fails to find its home in the celestial firmament of sparkling cinema.



Stefan Garcia SJ



 Visit the IMDB page for this film




 

FIREFLIES IN THE GARDEN - UK trailer

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