STARRING: RYAN REYNOLDS, JULIA ROBERTS, CARRIE-ANNE MOSS, WILLEM DAFOE, EMILY WATSON
IF RICHARD and Judy had a film club, Fireflies in the Garden is the sort of movie they would probably endorse as "terrific". A resolutely middlebrow dysfunctional family melodrama, it's one of those tediously self-congratulatory movies that projects ADVERTISEMENTan unearned air of superiority simply because it's not another slam-bang summer blockbuster.
The cast of name actors emoting like crazy and the wealth of literary references may give it the rustic patina of quality, but don't be fooled. In peddling overwrought emotion as shamelessly as some blockbusters do special effects, it's really just trying to disguise its lack of substance. Indeed, it often plays like a bad literary adaptation, but aside from some heavy-handed usage of the Robert Frost poem that supplies the film with its title, Fireflies in the Garden is actually based on an original script by director Dennis Lee. That nothing about it feels particularly original is down to the tired story it tells and the drab way it tells it.
Flashing back and forth in time, Ryan Reynolds takes the lead as Michael, a successful author – feel free to groan at will – whose unresolved issues with his brute-of-a-father, Charles (Willem Dafoe), are exacerbated when a rare family get-together is marred by a tragic accident that leaves Charles injured and Michael's mother, Lisa (Julia Roberts), dead. Having been bullied as a kid, Michael has recently completed a thinly fictionalised novel about his father as an act of revenge, but his mother's passing forces him to hang around long enough for family secrets to emerge that might change his outlook.
Thanks to Lisa dying early in the film, Roberts gets to exist mainly in flashback, where creaky ageing make-up is mercifully not a necessity. Still, these flashback scenes aren't especially illuminating, revelling in the torment suffered by Michael, but never suggesting much motivation for why Charles acted the way he did – or why Lisa put up with it (it's not like the film is set in the 1950s, though you'd never guess from the way some of it has been staged).
The film doesn't even have the courage of its convictions. With Michael's aunt played in the flashbacks by Heroes star Hayden Panettiere and in the present day by Emily Watson, there's an incestuous attraction between them that the film hints at, then steers clear of in favour of more textbook dysfunction involving alcoholic spouses (Carrie-Anne Moss as Michael's estranged wife), infidelity and teenage angst.
It's all very predictable, with the film choosing to resolve this entire trauma a little too easily with a bit of primal screaming, some tearful hugging and news of a family-uniting pregnancy.
