It’s hard to know if this colourful, stagey melodrama is meant as a tribute to or pastiche of Eugene O’Neill’s hard-scrabble plays. Perhaps it’s both. Justin Timberlake’s callow Mickey, a part-time lifeguard and full time pseudo-intellectual, starts an affair with the unhappy Ginny (Winslet). A former actress, she’s married to alcoholic Humpty (Belushi) and adjusting badly to life as a waitress. But Mickey’s eye soon strays from Ginny to her step-daughter Carolina (Temple), with predictably messy results.
There’s a thick vein of misanthropy here that’s barely leavened by its glowing artificiality, as Ginny’s life threatens to fly apart at the seams and take her family with it, but it’s a cynicism that feels typical of late-period Woody Allen. Winslet is on extraordinary form as a woman who’s all too conscious that the male attention she has always relied upon is disappearing, but she’s significantly better and more engaging than the film around her.
