A Home at the End of the World (R, 2004)

Bobby is a boy who loses his whole family. The older brother he adored is killed in an accident. His mother and father are so shattered that they become emotionally remote and both die before he graduates from high school. Bobby becomes close friends with Jonathan, the only child of Ned (Matt Frewer) and Alice (Sissy Spacek), and is taken in by Jonathan's family after his father dies. Years later, after Jonathan has gone to college and stayed on in New York, Bobby (now played by Colin Farrell) is still living with Ned and Alice. When they move to Arizona, Bobby goes to New York to stay with Jonathan (Dallas Roberts), who is gay, and his roommate, Claire (Robin Wright Penn). Claire seduces Bobby, and, when she becomes pregnant, the threesome decide to invent a new kind of family for themselves in a big old house in the country, a home at the end of the world.

The book on which A HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD is based is the internal musings of the four main characters. What made it work was the beauty of author Michael Cunningham's language. It is touching and illuminating, and even poetic, but that does not make a movie. What's left to put on film is the outlines of the story. Despite performances of great delicacy and insight, it dissolves into soapiness without the lyrical and meditative prose to provide context and texture.

Instead of holding it together, the grounding provided by top-notch performances makes the story seem episodic and superficial by contrast and some of the cinematic touches are heavy-handed. Farrell struggles with the double handicaps of having to play a character who is a bit of a blank and doing so in a truly atrocious wig, but he manages to capture Bobby's simplicity without making him seem simple-minded. But Roberts especially is revelatory. Just the way he enters a room or holds his head shows tremendous sensitivity and insight and his every glance is filled with delicate eloquence. First-time director Michael Mayer may have put too much faith in the ability of some overused and slightly cheesy music to make his points, but Roberts gets us as close as possible to the depth of understanding in Cunningham's novel.