Meadowland (2015)

Meadowland 2015 Not uninteresting film on paper with a strong and upsetting theme but which is much too soft and classic in its realization to hold you in suspense for 1h30! It’s much too long and slow and nothing much happens ! Not bad without being good!

It’s a well acted drama, but a too banal treatment. The drama at the beginning is only used as a pretext and is not touched on afterwards, except in the finale which, it is true, is moving, but not enough to raise the overall level. Throughout the film, we see moments of life without much interest, we see Luke Wilson in his job as a cop in extremely banal scenes and Olivia Wilde takes a liking to a student at her school, but once again nothing very exciting. That’s the problem with the film, the director misses the point, maybe it’s her way of dealing with the theme of grief which isn’t really a theme, but I didn’t connect with the whole thing at all which is too common and superficial so I quickly got bored. 

I would have loved to be able to give four stars, but “In the Evening Mist” in french & “Meadowland”, in original version, is boring, slow and unrealistic. I kept watching thinking that this film couldn’t possibly be that bad. The cast includes some very good actors so I kept watching hoping it would get better but it didn’t. The only interesting part was when Olivia Wilde’s character is on the roof going up with her brother-in-law and she is heading for the ledge. I thought she is about to jump at last some excitement, but alas, she does not. That’s how boring this movie is and you don’t care about these characters. Instead, she even goes and sleeps with a guy she doesn’t like so she can steal his car keys. Instead of doing everything in their power to find their child which any normal parent would do these two fall apart and are completely useless. I don’t care if it’s been a year: you never give up, you never stop fighting to find your child. Luke Wilson’s character set the cops back 30 years by being portrayed as a twisted cop who would give the address of the man guilty of manslaughter (for killing the daughter of one of his grieving buddies) to the girl’s father so he could get revenge. This film was just an incredible waste of time in the end.

Failed exercise. After a promising introduction , inconsistent wanderings that don’t even manage to make the distress communicative despite a rather good performance.

A film with no head or tail, the shots follow each other and look the same, we learn nothing new, the dialogues are empty… it should have been a 30min short film instead of lasting 1h30 where we are bored from beginning to end. 

That’s it!

I made several paragraphs of small reviews, seen from various angles… which all come together!!!

So… no matter what I do, I can’t find this movie good and I’m sorry for that.