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Review: A Home at the End of the World
"The movie re-examines the idea of family and what it means to be part of one."
By Ursula Mehl
In the simplest of terms, A Home at the End of the World, the new movie from first-time director Michael Mayer, is a story about love. Set in Cleveland, Ohio in 1967, the movie starts out at the time when the hippy-dippy peace and love movement was just getting into full swing. “Love is good” is the message that seems to permeate A Home at the Ends of the World.
The film chronicles the lives of Bobby (Colin Farrell) and Jonathan (Dallas Roberts), two boys who meet at their suburban high school. Quickly they become best friends, and are virtually inseparable. Bobby shows Jonathan an exciting new way of looking at world, while Jonathan gives Bobby a family stability that he doesn’t have in his own life. This is especially apparent in his connection to Jonathan’s mother Alice (Sissy Spacek), who takes Bobby in after both his parents die. After that, Bobby and Jonathan not only become best friends, but also brothers, adding another layer onto their already-deep relationship.
When they get older, Jonathan moves to New York, while Bobby stays in Cleveland with Jonathan’s parents. Eventually Bobby goes to New York and moves in with Jonathan. This is where he meets Clare (Robin Wright Penn), Jonathan’s unconventional and beautiful roommate. Clare and Bobby fall in love, and along with Jonathan they start their own version of a family.
As time goes on, cracks begin forming in their relationships. Tensions build up between Jonathan and Clare as they grow jealous over each other’s connection to Bobby. It seems that someone always ends up feeling left out in the triangular relationship these characters struggle to maintain.
Based on the novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham, A Home at the End of the World is a beautiful film. It manages to be sweet without ever being sappy. Love is a constant theme, but you never feel like it’s being forced down your throat. The movie re-examines the idea of family and what it means to be part of one. What holds a family together is not blood, but love. Bobby, Jonathan and Clare make their family work not because they share the same blood, but because they are all so in love with each other.
Bobby and Jonathan have the most complex relationship out of anybody in the movie, and Colin Farrell and Dallas Roberts do a superb job of showing the depth of that relationship on screen. No matter what happens in their lives, they always have each other, and their relationship speaks to the possibility that the person you’re meant to spend your life with can also be the person you’ve been with all along. At one point in the film Bobby tells Jonathan that his life is “perfect, just the way it is”. He could just as easily have been talking about the film itself.
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