Country: United States
Genre: Drama/ Mainstream
Director: Dennis Lee
Year: 2008
Rating: 
NOT WORTH YOUR TIME
It’s a bit of a hard call to say that Fireflies In The Garden isn’t worth your time. It’s not a complete piece of crap. It does have virtues. It makes it easier that this is a website devoted to Trash Cinema, so I can say with a fair amount of certainty that Fireflies In The Garden, which isn’t executed with a whole lot of flair or competence, wouldn’t be of much interest to my core audience.
Michael Waechter (Ryan Reynolds) and his family are working through their collective grief over an unexpected tragedy, but really this is mostly Michael’s story.
The movie begins with a car trip. Charles (Willem Dafoe) is berating a younger version of Michael in the back seat while his mother, Lisa (Julia Roberts) tries to run interference. Meanwhile, director Dennis Lee is dropping all sorts of heavy hints that a car accident is in the offing. It’s raining hard. We get frequent shots of the churning wheels of the car hydroplaning over the flooded asphalt. Charles forces young Michael to walk home in the rain. The now adult Michael awakens from a nightmare that he has run out into the road only to be hit by a car. But there is no accident. That’s going to come later.
When the accident comes, the audience is confused. We’ve met so many people in such a short time, and the script, co-written by Dennis Lee is ping-ponging so frantically between the past and the present, that we aren’t sure what’s reality and what’s imagined, who caused the accident, or when Michael found out about the accident.
The confusion is really unnecessary and counterproductive.
Another problem very early on. Charles’ belligerance is overplayed. Why must do modern writer/directors insist on clubbing the audience over the head? If Willem Dafoe had toned it down by two thirds, we still would have gotten it, although it’s not Dafoe’s fault. The director just didn’t protect him and he ends up looking like a fool.
The movie gets better as it goes along, but there’s too many unmotivated flashbacks, and the storytelling is muddy. There’s no clear throughline.
Movies like Fireflies In The Garden are why Hollywood suits prefer to greenlight high concept movies. Even if a hack writes and directs a movie with a very clear A to B plot and obvious conflicts, and he screws it up royally, it will still have some entertainment value. But if you screw up a movie that’s execution dependent, it has next to no value.
Quite a few good actors are involved in Fireflies In The Garden (besides the ones I’ve already mentioned, Emily Watson, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Ioan Gruffudd all make appearances) and I can guess why: in a time where practically every movie being produced is based on a game or a comic book, actors in Hollywood must be dying to play roles in movies about real people, real problems, in other words, movies about adults for adults. But they aren’t doing us any favors if the script isn’t there.
Unless the execution of an adult-themed movie is excellent (and maybe even then), it’ll just end up getting buried in the direct to DVD graveyard.
Curiously, the best thing in the movie is Ryan Reynolds. He’s been pigeonholed as a lightweight, but that’s a mistake. Reynolds works beautifully with children, and his dramatic chops have steadily improved from movie to movie. But director Dennis Lee fails him here. When someone important in his life dies practically in front of him, Reynolds shows less emotion than someone who has just got cut off in traffic. Surely, Dennis Lee knew that Reynold’s reaction was crucial. Directors have video playback these days. Lee should have caught it. Maybe Lee thought that Reynolds should have a delayed emotional reaction, which might be valid, but it would manifest itself differently.
And there are all sorts of similar mistakes in judgement in Lee’s direction. Mind you, there are parts of the movie that work, for example, when Michael takes his nephew and niece fishing. But there are many more misfires and errors in judgement. For example, there is a clear intimation that Michael and his young aunt where physically intimate when they were younger, which never pays off.
Anyway, I’ve probably already used more space writing about Fireflies In The Garden than it deserves. It’s a waste of a good cast at a time when we desperately need more good adult dramas on the big screen.
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