"I'm trying to tell you something, mom."
A woman going through a divorce goes back to her hometown to see her family, one she's never really been connected with. We see her struggling emotionally with her unloving adoptive mother, her unaware birth mother, and her violent husband in scenes that each tug on the heart, but in a bit of a twist, Roemer then shifts the drama away from all of these things.
Perhaps in need of a surrogate set of relationships, the woman befriends the neighbors, but soon finds herself in the middle of another couple going through a divorce, one made more complicated because of their pre-teen daughter and the wife spiraling with serious mental health issues. Instead of simply fleeing to the job awaiting her on the opposite coast, she sticks around, seeing herself in the little girl, and maybe trying to plug the emotional void left when the baby she had at 16 was taken away. The girl's mother naturally feels threatened, and even more so because the newcomer has an easy relationship with her husband. The emotions that are stirred up here are raw and visceral, building as they go.
Roemer exercises great restraint in the area of physical intimacy as well as in the many cliché directions this could have turned. For example, there is a very chilling moment with the wife staring through a rain-streaked window at night with about 30 minutes left, but Roemer doesn't follow that up with dramatic moments that you might see in a conventional Hollywood film. One also never gets the sense that the film is judging these characters, and in fact, one of them voices the belief that even the people who've treated us badly in life are not to blame.
I'm not sure I ever completely connected with this one as there was just so much emotional devastation in these lives, but in the gut wrenching feelings of love that's evaporated (or never was present at all), and in seemingly being on the outside looking in at one's own life, there is undeniable power.
