Ryan Gosling's career is worth watching as a talented young hunk eschewing the usual teen flicks.
Much like his excellent performance in "The Slaughter Rule" was a seamy take on the usual high school athlete movie, "The United States of Leland" is much more a meditation on inexplicable violence in post-Columbine American suburbia than his Leopold-and-Loeb type killer in the Hollywood "Murder By Numbers."
Same kudos to Michelle Williams, who post-"Dawson's Creek" has been building up theater and indie movie cred, even if no way do she and Jena Malone seem like sisters.
Altogether, writer/director Matthew Ryan Hoge has assembled a superb ensemble--Kevin Spacey's chillingly effective acerbic dad is a small role that plays on his own visible fame but he's also listed as a producer-- for what is basically a very American take on an Eric Rohmer-like talk fest. But whereas in French movies the talk is intellectual socializing, here it's like therapy that gradually reveals each character's truths, hidden feelings, and past and present emotional and physical abuse and exploitation.
Here, good guys (particularly Don Cheadle, in a performance that grippingly centers the film, and Chris Klein's character, who at first seems out of the TV show "7th Heaven") commit bad acts for bad motives, a contemptible character can do a right thing for despicable reasons, and others can have very mixed motives and actions, in very individual responses to a horrific act of violence.
The directing is a bit pedestrian, basically going in for close-ups in the monologues, but the power of the story and the revelations carry the movie forward despite some lags.
Much like his excellent performance in "The Slaughter Rule" was a seamy take on the usual high school athlete movie, "The United States of Leland" is much more a meditation on inexplicable violence in post-Columbine American suburbia than his Leopold-and-Loeb type killer in the Hollywood "Murder By Numbers."
Same kudos to Michelle Williams, who post-"Dawson's Creek" has been building up theater and indie movie cred, even if no way do she and Jena Malone seem like sisters.
Altogether, writer/director Matthew Ryan Hoge has assembled a superb ensemble--Kevin Spacey's chillingly effective acerbic dad is a small role that plays on his own visible fame but he's also listed as a producer-- for what is basically a very American take on an Eric Rohmer-like talk fest. But whereas in French movies the talk is intellectual socializing, here it's like therapy that gradually reveals each character's truths, hidden feelings, and past and present emotional and physical abuse and exploitation.
Here, good guys (particularly Don Cheadle, in a performance that grippingly centers the film, and Chris Klein's character, who at first seems out of the TV show "7th Heaven") commit bad acts for bad motives, a contemptible character can do a right thing for despicable reasons, and others can have very mixed motives and actions, in very individual responses to a horrific act of violence.
The directing is a bit pedestrian, basically going in for close-ups in the monologues, but the power of the story and the revelations carry the movie forward despite some lags.