Fireflies in the Garden: Gone Astray

Domestic dramas are nothing new to cinema. The interrelationships between family members will forever pose questions we struggle to answer and writers find fascinating to explore. But it’s hard not to roll your eyes when you see that another family saga is being released with an alcoholic father or over-possessive mother of some sort.  It’s all been done before. Dennis Lee, with his writing and directorial debut, doesn’t try to escape the genre or re-invent it, but focuses on telling a specific story of an over-bearing father and how detrimental the death of the matriarch can be to a family’s bond.  He navigates the effects of loss, love and hope through his protagonist Michael, the problem is, though, that he provides Michael with no clear goal or objective and therefore with no reason for us to really care.

Lisa Taylor (Julia Roberts) has just graduated from college, and the entire Taylor family has traveled back to their hometown to celebrate her accomplishment. The day of the reception, Lisa is killed in a car accident, which sends the entire family into a web of confusion and turmoil. Michael, played by a surprisingly good Ryan Reynolds, is reluctantly along for the ride, staying in the house he grew up in, now owned by his Aunt Jane (Emily Watson). Being in the house together sends each family member spiraling back into the past where flashbacks bring to life memories of Michael’s violent father Charles (William Dafoe), the teenage Jane (Hayden Panetierre) and Lisa who never quite manages to maintain the peace and protect her son. The flashbacks weave with the present, where Jane’s adolescent son Christopher struggles with many of the same issues of guilt and acceptance that Michael faced when he was a boy. The moments where Lee invites us into the psyche of the children are by far the most compelling.

The first thing that enters your mind, before the film even beings, is the casting. Ryan Reynolds in an Indie film? Where are the green tights and/or unintelligent frat jokes? But Reynolds manages to deliver an intriguing performance with the script at hand. When he cracks jokes, mostly to escape his own pain, the film jumps off the screen and becomes more than just Lee’s nearly autobiographical nightmare. Reynolds and his younger self, played by the most captivating member of the cast, 14 year-old Cayden Boyd, are convincing as the same person, unlike Panetierre who possesses a sex appeal Watson undeniably lacks. Reynolds’s dry sense of humor is a believable result of the tribulations he was put through as a kid, holding paint cans at arms length for hours is an act of fatherly punishment no one could erase from their memory.  

Each character’s story line is clearly developed, but they all unravel into a pulp of nothingness. Charles vacillates between a “monster” and a loving father, an endless cycle where we don’t see the character grow or change.  Jane switches between loving, supportive Aunt to Michael, to berating him saying that everything he touches “turns to shit.” Even Michael can’t seem to grasp onto an aspiration. Does he want to mend the relationship with his father, or end it? Now, all this sounds actually extremely realistic, especially regarding the fine line families walk between love and hate. But when creating a film, where an audience should be along for the ride, rooting for some kind of victory or defeat, the character has to have something to fight for. In this film, no one can quite decide what he or she wants. Yes, it may be realistic, but to us, it’s uninteresting.

And it’s sad, because this film could have been great. Cinematographer Danny Moder delivers absolutely stunning shots, and their beauty comes from the script and the situations it puts its characters in. It’s convenient how that moment of reconciliation comes in the middle of a green pasture and vulnerability in the halls of an empty stained-glass church. Kudos to Mr. Lee. But unfortunately, after the brutal premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in 2008, the film took a bashing. Horrible reviews, followed by the loss of its’ distributor, left the film without a home and the potential for the formidable “straight to DVD” condemnation. Lee, Moder and real-life wife Roberts along with family and friends struggled to gain back funding and re-cut in the film, which could have caused more harm than good.

It seems that the film’s backbone and perhaps clarity in character development and objectives were sacrificed to the editing room floor. Or were they not in the script from the start? Maybe Michael’s ex-wife Kelly, cast strangely as Carrie-Anne Moss, was meant for more than just the “fucking at a funeral” scene, turning out to be just another character without a point or purpose.