Drama Archives - Page 38 of 119 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Midnight’s Children (2012)

November 1, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, Fantasy, India, Theatrical

**/****
starring Satya Bhabha, Shahana Goswami, Rajat Kapoor, Darsheel Safary
screenplay by Salman Rushdie, based on his novel
directed by Deepa Mehta

by Angelo Muredda It's a nice bit of synergy, good for at least one heavily-latexed Tom
Hanks reincarnation, that Deepa Mehta's adaptation of Midnight's Children should come out so soon after the Wachowskis'
and Tom Tykwer's ill-fated stab at Cloud
Atlas, perhaps the only contemporary novel more labyrinthine than Salman
Rushdie's magic-realist opus. So earnest are both efforts that one is tempted
to ignore their fundamental failures as either cinema or adaptation and bow to
the good intentions of the faithful stewards. Yet one wonders about the value
of such graceful gestures when, combined, the two films take up a staggering
five hours–indefensible, given the limpid mysticism they have to show for
themselves at their muted conclusions. Read together, they're proof that in the
absence of a real necessity for adaptation, big novels make for small movies.

Flight (2012)

November 1, 20122012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Directors: Robert Zemeckis, Drama, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Denzel Washington, Don Cheadle, Kelly Reilly, Melissa Leo
screenplay by John Gatins
directed by Robert Zemeckis

by Bill Chambers We open on a dingy little hotel room. It’s hard to say what the night before was, but this is definitely a “morning after.” A beautiful woman (Nadine Velazquez) emerges from bed, fully nude. There’s another warm body there, a man, churning and groaning awake beneath the covers. He stirs to take a phone call from an ex-wife about child support while the woman gets dressed, unfazed. Finally the man, Whip (Denzel Washington), wills himself out of bed to sip his morning coffee, or in this case, to take a giant toot of cocaine. The film then cuts to him at work–he’s an airline pilot. It’s a sickly funny reveal unavoidably ruined by the trailer, the commercials, even the poster image of Washington in uniform, but what’s fascinating is how the joke now works in reverse: The audience starts tittering in disbelief the moment Whip is introduced, since they already know what he does for a living.

Strangers on a Train (1951) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

October 31, 2012****/****, 1950s, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Thriller

Strangers5

****/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B
BD – Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Farley Granger, Ruth Roman, Robert Walker, Leo G. Carroll
screenplay by Raymond Chandler and Czenzi Ormonde, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Alfred Hitchcock’s queerest film (Rope notwithstanding) and proof positive of the director’s knack for casting men of ambiguous sexual mooring in roles that cannily exploit it, Strangers on a Train, shot in vibrant contrasts by the great Robert Burks, is best read as a dark comedy–a noir in the most perverse sense of the term. Find in it the finest performance by troubled Robert Walker, tormented to his grave by David O. Selznick’s infatuation with and eventual theft of wife Jennifer Jones and committed, not long after Strangers on a Train finished shooting, to a mental institution, where he was the victim of an accidentally-lethal dose of sedative. Playing a character named after the kidnapper and murderer of the Lindbergh baby, Walker is Bruno, a spatted dandy who bumps shoes with hero Guy (Farley Granger–the “girl” in the Rope dyad) on a train and ostensibly hatches a plan with the pliant tennis star to “criss-cross” murders (trade assassinations, as it were), freeing each of them from the burden of blood motive. Bruno wants his father dead; Guy, involved in a very public affair with the senator’s daughter Anne (Ruth Roman) but shackled to loathsome Miriam (Kasey Rogers), would benefit from Miriam’s timely demise. So when Miriam turns up dead by Bruno’s hand, Guy is trapped by circumstance into either murdering Bruno’s dad or going to the police and implicating himself and his lover in a conspiracy.

Steel Magnolias (1989) – Blu-ray Disc

October 25, 20121980s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama

*/**** Image B Sound B Extras D+
starring Sally Field, Dolly Parton, Shirley MacLaine, Daryl Hannah
screenplay by Robert Harling, based on his play
directed by Herbert Ross

by Walter Chaw Submitted for your
approval, shrill, neo-Tennessee Williams actress-posturing from the pantheon of
late-'80s harpies, featuring a special martyr performance from a Julia Roberts just months away from achieving sociopathic superstardom as a high-priced whore in Pretty
Woman. Not being able to relate to Herbert Ross's demographically-precise Steel Magnolias in any way, I nevertheless see in its popularity an opportunity for introspection about how little I actually understand other peoples' tastes. From my vantage, Steel Magnolias is two hours of
nattering and bon mots set in a home-salon run by Truvy (Dolly Parton, the
very definition of down-home warmth and genuineness), assisted by dizzy Arnelle
(Daryl Hannah), and frequented by diabetic Shelby (Roberts), her mother M'Lynn
(Sally Field), happy widow Clairee (Olympia Dukakis), and cranky widow Ouiser
(Shirley MacLaine). Ouiser basically stalks around swearing like a sailor and
getting shat on by birds, Clairee floats on momentum won (and fast flagging)
from Moonstruck, and M'Lynn turns into MacLaine
from Terms of Endearment. My favourite is when she force-feeds Shelby a
glass of orange juice in a vision of Hell I'd like to one day mash-up with the
brainwashing sequence from A Clockwork Orange. Along the way, the young
ones become pregnant, a stray man wanders through now and again, and each of the
grey old iron ladies gets a moment to demonstrate her humanity and humour in
the face of life's little, and big, tragedies.

Cloud Atlas (2012)

October 23, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Sci-Fi

**/****
starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant
screenplay by Lana Wachowski & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowski, based on the novel by David Mitchell
directed by Lana Wachowski & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowski

by Walter Chaw It speaks to the
extraordinary hubris of the tripartite godhead behind Cloud Atlas (the
Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer) that in the middle of a 172-minute film composed of
interminable exposition and multiple timelines, they would invoke
long-winded Russian prisoner Solzhenitsyn without fear of ironic reprisal.
More, it speaks to their hubris that they would make a film this sprawling and
messianic about the Disney maxim that you're never too puny to change the
world, so don't stop trying, tiger! If you're at all offended by white
people doing the "ah, so" thing in yellow-face, by the way: relax,
because there're also white people doing the evil Fu Manchu thing in
yellow-face. What there isn't is white people doing blackface, suggesting that
if you're about to make the argument that Cloud Atlas is about how we're
all the same under the skin to the extent that we could have been different
races in past and future lives, then don't bother. That doesn't stop the movie,
though, from talking about the evils of slavery with a super-duper,
plantation-attitudes-changing Magic Negro, or from positing a future-Korea that
clones wage-slaves before paying off never-accidental post-modern
self-referents. If you were to take Cloud Atlas remotely seriously,
in fact, you'd have to address it as an attempt to create a completely
post-modern artifact in a world that didn't already have "Beavis &
Butthead". Quick, look, the author of that manuscript the old editor in
the 2012 timeline is reading was written by the kid from the 1973 timeline who had a crush
on one of the black versions of Halle Berry (the one playing Pam Grier)! Did I
mention that Berry has a timeline in whiteface? Or that Hugo Weaving and
Ben Whishaw have ones in drag?

Magic Mike (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

October 22, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, DVD, Theatrical

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras D+
starring Channing Tatum, Alex Pettyfer, Cody Horn, Matthew McConaughey
screenplay by Reid Carolin
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Angelo Muredda Magic Mike opens with Saul Bass’s red-and-black Warner Bros. logo, retired in 1984. That gesture is meant, I think, to pitch what follows as a throwback to smarter studio fare along the lines of Hal Ashby’s Being There, but it also courts less flattering comparisons to the likes of the Police Academy movies. Steven Soderbergh’s latest pop exercise falls somewhere between those two poles–a little too close for comfort to the Guttenberg side. Conceived as a loose riff on star Channing Tatum’s time as a male stripper, it has a solid run as a cheerful smut delivery mechanism before hanging up its thong to become a rote ‘80s melodrama about good kids corrupted by bad drugs. If the howl of “Yes!” that greeted the first bared ass at my screening is any indication, that transformation won’t hurt the bottom line (a figure these strippers always seem to have on their minds), though it does make Magic Mike another promising yet half-baked Soderbergh project instead of a good movie, sans asterisks.

Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai (2011)

October 18, 2012****/****, 2011, 2012, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Japan, Martial Arts, UK

****/****
starring Ebizo Ichikawa, Eita, Hikari Mitsushima, Naoto Takenaka
screenplay by Kikumi Yamagashi, based on the novel by Yasuhiko Takiguchi
directed by Takashi Miike

by Walter Chaw Masaki Kobayashi's 1962 masterpiece Harakiri is the height of austere–almost Noh–Japanese filmmaking. It lands somewhere between Ozu's pillow flicks and Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, and, of course, as Kobayashi is the auteur behind the Human Condition trilogy, that martial austerity, that antiestablishment mien, is to be expected, if impossible to ever truly gird oneself against. It's set in 1630, at the end of feudal Japan, when collapsing fiefdoms mean throngs of ronin overflowing into the countryside and, occasionally, asking for the right to commit ritual suicide in an "honourable" courtyard. Tsugumo is one such samurai, but before he's granted the privilege of dragging a sword across his belly, House of Iyi counsellor Saito insists on telling him of a previous penitent, Chijiiwa, who claimed he wanted to kill himself but only really wanted a handout. Seeking to make an example of Chijiiwa and the effrontery he represents to the Bushido code, the Iyi clan decides to force the issue–even after it's revealed that Chijiiwa has, somewhere along the way, pawned his iron for a bamboo stick with a hilt. It's a kind of torture, and everyone watches. Kobayashi goes into flashback, unexpectedly, telling the story of the young samurai we, at first, are complicit in mocking. We participate in his torture. We believe he deserves it. By the end of the film, we don't believe that anymore.

Wuthering Heights (2011)

October 18, 2012****/****, 2011, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, UK

****/****
starring Kaya Scodelario, James Howson, Solomon Glave, Nichola Burley
screenplay by Andrea Arnold, Olivia Hetreed, based on the novel by Emily Brontë
directed by Andrea Arnold

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The animalism, the absolute withering upheaval of the “feminized” Victorian-novel tradition, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights has long been one of my favourite books. What’s never been properly captured in its myriad film adaptations is the earthiness that tethers its gothic, sometimes supernatural, trappings. Neither guilty pleasure nor bodice-ripper, it’s a wallow, a traipse through high heather that only hides the wet suck of the moors, and damned if it doesn’t, when all’s said and done, project something like a masculine gaze in its positioning of brooding, demonic Heathcliff at its centre. It’s a romance–a destructive, devouring romance constructed all of regrets and unconsummated desire; and Andrea Arnold’s wise, visceral take on it is the underbelly of Jane Campion’s brilliant Bright Star. Together, they would construct a poetic whole: the Romanticist yin of Bright Star to Wuthering Heights‘ roaring Victorian yang. Arnold’s film is so good, in fact, that it clarifies how it is that Romanticism, through Victorianism, eventually becomes Emerson’s Naturalism and then, ultimately, Modernism. It’s a continuum, isn’t it, and Wuthering Heights is the missing link in a very particular Darwin chart. The excitement of it for me is that it’s an example, pure and new, that film at its best is poetry.

The Horse Whisperer (1998) – Blu-ray Disc

October 14, 2012****/****, 1990s, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Romance, Scarlett Johansson

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras D+
starring Robert Redford, Kristin Scott Thomas, Sam Neill, Scarlett Johansson
screenplay by Eric Roth and Richard LaGravenese, based on the novel by Nicholas Evans
directed by Robert Redford

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Revisiting Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer fourteen years after I last saw it, I am relieved to encounter a film that isn’t simply marking time until a climactic moment that was for me a cherished eureka at the movies. The picture begins with Grace (13-year-old Scarlett Johansson) rising at the crack of dawn to go horseback riding with her friend Judith (Kate Bosworth, billed as “Catherine”). Redford focuses on Johansson’s socked feet slinking past her parents’ bedroom door, and subsequently draws a lot of attention to legs and feet here–not in a fetish-y way, but as if they’re a person’s “tell.” I misremembered this scene, for what it’s worth, as Grace doing something wrong by sneaking out, but in fact her parents are not at all surprised to find her gone by the time they’re up and around. Mom (Kristin Scott Thomas) is basically Anna Wintour–her name’s even Annie–and Dad, Robert (Sam Neill), is, we infer, the kind of lawyer who does a lot of pro bono work.

Keep the Lights On (2012)

October 11, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Theatrical

***/****
starring Thure Lindhardt, Zachary Booth, Julianne Nicholson, Paprika Steen
written and directed by Ira Sachs

by Angelo Muredda Life imitated art when Ira Sachs's Keep
the Lights On won the Teddy for best feature at the 2012 Berlinale.
In the film, the same honour–albeit in the documentary category–goes to Erik
(Thure Lindhardt) for his long-gestating profile of queer photographer and
filmmaker Avery Willard, a project Sachs himself realized this year,
concurrently with his fictional surrogate. Despite the intimate overlaps
between Sachs's life and his most affecting movie to date, knowing the writer-director's background going in is hardly a prerequisite to falling for Keep the Lights On's
honest charms. Sachs lets his biography seep into the material, effectively
colouring it blue.

La Grande Illusion (1937) [StudioCanal Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

October 2, 2012****/****, 1930s, 2012, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Jean Renoir, Drama, FFC Must-Own, War

Grand Illusion
****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Jean Gabin, Dita Parlo, Pierre Fresnay, Marcel Dalio
screenplay by Jean Renoir and Charles Spaak
directed by Jean Renoir

by Bryant Frazer If you watch it cold, the opening scenes of La Grande Illusion (hereafter Grand Illusion) make for a confounding experience. The film opens in a French canteen, equipped with bar and phonograph player, where an aristocratic captain calls a working-class lieutenant to accompany him on a routine reconnaissance mission. One short dissolve later, without even the narrative pleasantry of a stock-footage flight over enemy territory, we’re in a German canteen, equipped with bar and phonograph player, where an aristocratic captain announces that he’s shot down an enemy plane. Another fade-out, and the Frenchmen are quickly welcomed at the German dinner table. The German captain even apologizes for the French lieutenant’s broken arm.

TIFF ’12: The Paperboy + At Any Price

September 18, 20122012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Mystery, Sports, Thriller, TIFF

THE PAPERBOY
*/****
directed by Lee Daniels

AT ANY PRICE
*/****
directed by Ramin Bahrani

by Bill Chambers The great Pete Dexter writes tersely about criminal perversity in the southern United States; the problem in adapting him to the cinema is that without his hardboiled prose, which lends everything he writes the whiff of reportage (a newspaperman originally, he turned to novels after drug dealers beat him nearly to death over one of his columns), the psychosexual situations he describes threaten to collapse into camp. Because of this, Dexter and Precious/Shadowboxer auteur Lee Daniels sounded like a match made in Hell to me, but the blunt force of Daniels's shamelessness proves strangely compatible with Dexter's writing in The Paperboy, based on the latter's 1995 best-seller. If only he could direct! Daniels is like a less bourgeois Henry Jaglom, cutting between a panoply of indifferently-composed shots like a frog on a griddle with little feeling for either spatial or character dynamics.

TIFF ’12: Silver Linings Playbook

September 18, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Family, Film Festivals, Robert De Niro, Romance, TIFF

***/****
directed by David O. Russell

by Angelo Muredda Awards season does strange things to American filmmakers in search of gold hardware. Last year, Alexander Payne delivered his James L. Brooks movie in The Descendants, toning down his tartness for a family drama both more palatable and significantly shoddier than usual. There's a comparable transformation in the cards this year for David O. Russell, who showed signs of mellowing with 2010's The Fighter but was still miles from the Cameron Crowe job he's now pulled off, to surprisingly strong effect, with Silver Linings Playbook, a Jerry Maguire for manic depressives.

TIFF ’12: Something in the Air

September 16, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Coming of Age, Drama, France, TIFF

Après mai
**½/****
written and directed by Olivier Assayas

by Angelo Muredda Those who see Olivier Assayas’s new film
stateside will be met with an ambivalent gesture right from the title card,
which juxtaposes the Godardian red and blue of the French title, “APRES
MAI” (“After May”), with the mousy English translation,
“Something in the Air.” The French is the more precise, referring to
the dispirited state of radicals following the events of May, 1968, while
Thunderclap Newman’s yearning anthem about armed insurrection evokes only a
roughly simpatico version of late-’60s American idealism falling into ’70s
cynicism. Vague as the English title reads by comparison, though, it turns out
to be the more fitting of the two. Indeed, for all of Assayas’s personal
attachment to this material, Something in the Air isn’t significantly more illuminating
about the period than something like Almost
Famous, which uses the titular song to roughly the same effect, evincing
the same impossible nostalgia for a time when everyone was supposedly moving
together on one big bus, so to speak.

Ed Wood (1994) – [Special Edition] DVD + Blu-ray Disc

September 16, 20121990s, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, Drama, DVD

***½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras A
BD – Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Johnny Depp, Martin Landau, Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette
screenplay by Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski
directed by Tim Burton

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw Raging Bull for starfuckers, Ed Wood is in a lot of ways the quintessential dissection of the allure of Hollywood, allying it more closely, perhaps, with a different Martin Scorsese film, The King of Comedy. (It's The King of Comedy recast with the stalked celebrity a willing participant in the stalker's obsessive lunacy.) Ed Wood diverges from most biopics in director Tim Burton's tactic of skewing the film towards the same sort of kitsch-surreal of Wood's own films, managing in so doing the trick that David Cronenberg performed with Naked Lunch: a hagiography that's as much critical analysis as hommage. It engages in a conversation about how Wood's films are seen at the same time that it endeavours to tell the highlights of Wood's life. The result is a picture that bridges the gap between cult and camp classic; the melancholic and the melodramatic; and the difference between a director of vision and a director with a vision that sucks.

TIFF ’12: Blackbird

September 15, 20122012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

***½/****
written and directed by Jason Buxton

by Bill Chambers Jason Buxton's Blackbird is an important film but a primally engaging one that doesn't feel at all like medicine or, God forbid, an Afterschool Special. The destined-for-greatness Connor Jessup is Sean Randall, a broody but essentially sweet teen who lives with his divorced dad (Michael Buie) and loves from afar the popular Deanna (Alexia Fast). Sean's a modern-day Boo Radley, an artistically-inclined goth kid stranded in a passive-aggressive sports culture: His father operates the Zamboni at the local rink where Deanna's boyfriend–Cory (Craig Arnold), natch–practices hockey. Cory torments Sean at school, and a guidance counsellor suggests that rather than retaliate Sean vent his spleen on paper–which he does, via a hypothetical revenge scenario ("It's a story") he stupidly cross-posts to the Internet. The torch-wielding villagers show up at his subsequent court hearing like it's a town-hall meeting; in this post-Columbine world, he's never going to get a fair shake.

TIFF ’12: Everyday

September 14, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Christmas, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

**½/****
directed by Michael Winterbottom

by Angelo Muredda Michael Winterbottom makes projects more than he makes films, and happy are the rare few that bridge the gap. Everyday comes close at times, with no thanks to the unnecessarily tricked-out structure, which picks up with a young British family at holiday satellite points spread out over a five-year period and watches them cope with separation anxiety in between. In theory, this narrative-by-checkpoint strategy most resembles 2004's dismal 9 Songs, where Winterbottom watched a dull relationship bloom and die over the course of nine dull concerts and miserable sex scenes, but the film can't help but be improved by the material this time.

TIFF ’12: Frances Ha

September 13, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

***½/****
directed by Noah Baumbach

by Angelo Muredda There's a lot to love in Frances Ha, but the highlight is surely a tracking shot of star, muse, and co-writer Greta Gerwig clumsily bounding through the streets of Brooklyn to the sounds of David Bowie's "Modern Love." (In a daily dispatch for mubi.com, Fernando Croce astutely toasts her "galumphing radiance.") You could read this moment as either a joyous corrective to Michael Fassbender's miserable NYC jog in Shame or a direct lift, down to the song's abrupt stop, from Leos Carax's Mauvais sang–think of Gerwig as the Ginger to Denis Lavant's Fred. Or you could just accept it as the clearest expression of the film's ambling structure: a lovely headlong dive through traffic en route to somewhere safe but rewarding.

TIFF ’12: The Iceman

September 12, 20122012, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Gangster, TIFF

*½/****
directed by Ariel Vroman

by Bill Chambers Although The Iceman proves that a movie cannot get by on Michael Shannon's dark charisma alone, Shannon has reached that point in his career where his casting supplies the lion's share of subtext. Hence, a line like "I dub cartoons for Disney"–uttered not two minutes into the film, before there's enough context for it to be a joke or a lie–induces titters of recognition. Of course, most will know going in that Shannon's playing real-life contract killer Richard Kuklinski, who's thought to have dispatched over 100 people, professionally-speaking. In The Iceman, the film version of his life, smut-bootlegger Kuklinski starts a family with winsome Barbara (a baby-talky Winona Ryder) at the same time mobster Roy DeMeo (Ray Liotta) makes him an enforcer. He keeps Barbara in the dark about his new profession (his old one, too), telling her he's a stockbroker to explain the conspicuous infusions of cash; by the time their angelic daughters are in middle-school, he's settled comfortably into the schizoid role of suburban-dad-slash-serial-killer. Eventually, he sub-contracts himself out to Pronge (Chris Evans, so skeevy I mistook him for Bradley Cooper), a free agent who operates out of a Mr. Softee truck and gives Kuklinski the idea to freeze his victims, and thus his eponymous nickname.

TIFF ’12: To the Wonder

September 12, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Terrence Malick, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

**/****
written and directed by Terrence Malick

by Angelo Muredda For a long time, it seemed like Terrence Malick would vanish altogether before he made a serious misstep, but for better or worse, he's now delivered To the Wonder, the bum note that forces you to warily retrace a major artist's career. A muted greatest-hits compilation of Malick's oeuvre, To the Wonder borrows whole apostrophized lines to God from The Tree of Life, nicks The Thin Red Line's trick of meting out disembodied humanist voiceovers across the cast (including an underused Javier Bardem), and re-stages Pocahontas's carefree romp through the palace gardens in The New World via a young girl's joyous dance through the aisles of a supermarket. It's all here, in a manner of speaking, but as the little girl tells her mother at one point, "There's something missing."