A Home at the End of the World

by Shari L. Rosenblum

A Home at the End of the World – a film spectacularly centered on the metaphors and realities of its title: home, end, world -- opens in Cleveland in 1967, with a prologue both literal and figurative: it features love (between brothers, between a young couple caught in flagrante delicto ) death (a peaceful cemetery beside a suburban home, a family tragedy), and the highs and lows of windowpane clarity (LSD and sliding doors), all seen through the eyes of a 9-year-old boy, Bobby Morrow. There is an ease to these opening moments that seeps into the rest of the film -- the ease of a world beyond judgment, beyond guilt, beyond oughts and ought-nots. A 60s of the mind: psychedelic, sybaritic, embracing -- it shapes and defines for the world of the film the boy, himself, as he grows into a man (played by Colin Farrell): less unconventional than unburdened by convention -- and gives him an adultness that makes him seem to some the spirit of a child (although, apparently, sufficiently grown to require the regrettable cut of a rumoredly notable uncut nude scene).

Adapting his second novel for the screen, Michael Cunningham, whose novel The Hours earned a Pulitzer Prize along with several Oscar nominations for the film, accomplishes the subtle feat of turning highly literary characters into effective cinematic ones -- smartly excising the excess lines and characters that would distract on the screen. Having conceived the players first through inner dialogues, he turns them inside out here so that they bleed through to the surface. The novel, though well-written, was too self-conscious for my tastes, shifting narratives and commenting upon itself in ways that cheapened it, I thought. Not nearly so trite as its tagline, “Family can be whatever you want it to be,” the film, helmed by first-time film director Michael Mayer (veteran of the stage), takes on the harder task of examining the threads that bind people together -- love and sex and sex and love -- as universal and inescapable, experienced in different modes, but to the same ends, among us all. Despite its social cred, it plays less like a sociological treatise, and more like an interpretive dance of the human heart -- twirling between comfort and completeness to Jefferson Airplane, Laura Nyro, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, Dusty Springfield, Steve Reich, and film composer Duncan Sheik -- teased and subordinated, reaching out, and tripping over itself.

Mindbending, genderbending, bending with the winds of fate, Bobby is the constant – an optimist born of sorrow, orphan of a philosophy long since discarded, he loves without boundaries, the living and the dead, the old and the young, man and woman. In the first transition, the little boy lost (Andrew Chalmers plays Bobby at 9, looking a lot like a 9-year-old Farrell) becomes the adolescent undaunted (Erik Smith plays Bobby at 16 – a charming man-boy), and befriends Jonathan, a shy and vulnerable high school outcast (Harris Allan, playing in contrast to his Queer as Folk persona), turning both the boy and his mother (Sissy Spacek) on to the freedom of inhaling, and responding equally, and openly, to each of their return expressions of love (it's just love, his brother had assured him all those years ago; nothing to freak out about). The tenderness of these scenes is constructed, but empathic – so necessary to the movement we are loath to question it.

By 24, the grown Bobby (now fully Farrell, in a godawful wig) is moved into an apartment in the East Village, which Jonathan (Dallas Roberts, looking and sounding scarily like Austin Pendleton), now out and about, shares with divorcee Clare (Robin Wright Penn), a Janowitz-role model slave of New York. Desire and jealousy separate and unite the trio, with Bobby in the middle and on both sides of the bed -- but it's never scurrilous, never cheesy, never condemnable. It's just love, tempered by death, and it gives birth to hope: in a café called Home, a field strewn with ashes, and a child named Rebecca, from the Hebrew, for “to bind” (the meaning resonant, but unstated in the film).

A Home at the End of the World is a restrained dramatic work, abbreviated to an effective emotional shorthand. It unfolds at a slow pace, bordering on the edges of soapy melodrama, and some of the writing, a bad line repeated now and again, might lend itself to pathos more than perspicacity, but the whole of it takes you to a place apart. The acting is superb -- the aging of the characters persuasive. Roberts is heartbreaking as the torn and tortured Jonathan; Wright Penn finds the soul of Clare's would-be restless spirit yearning for the schoolgirl's dream; and Farrell, zipless, is genuinely compelling -- a stretch from the bad boy of such disparate angles as Phone Booth, Daredevil, and Intermission, but one he manages with grace (particularly once his bad hair is shorn). His performance grounds the text, centers the story, and anchors the emotions -- it is layered, textured, and ultimately, irresistibly, desirable for the fullness of his commitment.

©2004 Shari L. Rosenblum
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