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At first glance, MAIN ST. would seem to have all the ingredients for an absorbing piece - a top-notch cast (with two Brits doing very creditable Southern accents), a strong sense of place (Raleigh, North Carolina), and a taut, spare script by veteran Horton Foote. Then why is the movie such a disappointment? Its subject-matter is a pertinent one: the decline of American urban life and the schemes hatched by entrepreneurs to regenerate it, which might not necessarily please the existing residents. However the production is particularly slow-moving: the camera spends a long time focusing on tight close-ups of the protagonists, especially Ellen Burstyn as Georgiana Carr. This would be a perfectly acceptable strategy, were it not for the consciously showy nature of the performances: the actors are allowed to get away with the kind of theatrical gestures and facial movements that would not seem out of place in Victorian melodrama. As a result, we end up not really caring about the characters at all. Matters are not helped by the treacly soundtrack (from the normally reliable Patrick Doyle) that obtrudes itself on several occasions. Perhaps the material might have been better if another director had handled it.

Review: Personally, I couldn't see the point of this movie. All the way through the film I thought that there was going to be a major twist, especially with Firth's character, but nothing really happens. Its about a small community which used to be the main producers for cigarettes and Firth company decides to rent some space in the town to store hazardous waste. The lady that he is renting the space from, has severe money problems and she is scared about losing her house so she is relying on the rental money to keep her house. Once her niece realises that the company is storing waste, she decides to take action but after a bad accident with one of the trucks that was transporting the waste, Firth decides to leave the business. I honestly found the movie cheap and really boring. The cast sounded promising, with Colin Firth and Orlando Bloom taking the lead, but the movie was a waste of time and money. The acting isn't that bad from the cast but I didn't like Bloom and Firth's terrible deep South accents and I didn't find any of the characters that interesting. I'm glad that the director didn't make it into a 2 hour epic movie because the storyline really does dry up after a while, which is a shame because it would have been half decent if there was actually a point to the characters individual stories. Disappointing!

Round-Up: After the successful Lord Of The Rings and Pirates Of The Caribbean movies, I thought that Orlando Bloom was going to be a major star but I haven't really seen him shine in any other movies. At the age of 38 he still has a chance to prove that he can really act, away from the big budget movies, but I'm yet to see him do anything that great. As for the award winning Colin Firth, this just has to go down as another bad day at the office but he really does need to make some better choices in the movies that he takes on. In this film, Bloom and Firth only really cross paths once so the director really didn't take advantage of the cast. He also could have made some use of Andrew McCarthy, who has been missing from the big screen for ages but he only had a little part which wasn't that memorable. At the end of the day, I really didn't enjoy this film but I will give it a couple of stars, just for Ellen Burstyn's performance.

Budget: N/A Worldwide Gross: $2,560 (Really Terrible!)

I recommend this movie to people who are into their dramas about a small town which is promised a prosperous future after a company rents an available warehouse to store hazardous chemicals. 2/10

This movie is a perfect example of what can go wrong when you elevate someone to "national treasure" status. People have suggested that Horton Foote would be embarrassed by this last effort of his. I maintain that he is the primary cause for that embarrassment. I'm from a small town. I understand the value of this type of subject matter and how it should be undertaken. I completely comprehend "character studies" and "place studies". This movie is a very poor example of all the above. Simply put, Horton Foote has written a very bad screenplay. What's worse, director John Doyle not only doesn't seem to realize it but he has no sense of pace let alone story---hence this is his only big screen credit. This screenplay is so bad, it is reminiscent of a high school student effort right down to the embarrassing overused bad last line. A gifted cast (although Colin Firth is totally miscast) is wasted. Orlando Bloom and Patricia Clarkson seem the only ones trying to navigate without benefit of a road map. The so-called moral of the story is so defeated by the vagueness and dreary boredom of the storyline that there winds up being no moral at all.

When I saw the movie had actors Colin Firth, Orlando Bloom, Amber Tamblyn, Patricia Clarkson participating I thought this would be a movie worth watching, unfortunately I was mistaken.

While the actors do a good job with what they were provided with, the movie does nothing for them, it is a go nowhere movie that to me was a complete waste of time, thankfully not a huge amount of time to waste considering the length of the movie.

I have long been a big fan of Colin Firth and generally seek out movies that he is in. Unfortunately, while I felt he did a good job I think he made a bad choice with this one.

4 out of 10 for me.

Horton Foote (1916 - 2009) ) was an American playwright and screenwriter, perhaps best known for his Academy Award-winning screenplays for the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird and the 1983 film Tender Mercies, and his notable live television dramas during the Golden Age of Television. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1995 for his play The Young Man From Atlanta. His last original screenplay as MAIN STREET: it is fortunate that he didn't live to see it produced. MAIN STREET seems to have something to say - that the economic crisis has devastated small towns to the point of making questionable decisions out of desperation about improving their near ghost town status; that lessons from around the world (Chernobyl and Fukushima, etc) about toxic waste too often go unheeded; that flight of youth from small towns merely to seek change is not always emotionally convincing a decision: that family history and the accoutrements of same don't necessarily guarantee survival for descendants. And out of these plausible concerns could come a decent story, but here the result is flatline. In his film debut as a director John Doyle (known for fine productions of the operas Peter Grimes, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, and the musical comedy Company) he fails to show a grasp of the use of film to tell a story and we are left with a stew of separate ingredients that seem almost immiscible.

Durham, North Carolina is the setting - a town shrinking by the year because of lack of jobs and crumbling businesses - and the major (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) is desperate, deciding whether to schedule or move or cancel the annual parade from Thanksgiving to Christmas due to the town's lack of interest and depression. Enter Gus Leroy (Colin Firth) who has rented a defunct tobacco warehouse from a town widow Georgiana Carr (Ellen Burstyn) to store canisters of Hazardous Waste awaiting transport to Vernon, Texas for burying: Leroy's apparent Ecology informed company offers the Durham city council the opportunity for economic resurrection. Georgiana has misgivings about the rental and is faced with the fact that her trust fund form her wealthy father is depleted and she must consider selling the mansion in which she has lived since her birth. She seeks advice form her niece Willa (Patricia Clarkson) who at first objects but on meeting Leroy falls for the man and the project. As a sidebar another family faces changes: young Mary Saunders (Amber Tamblyn) is under the spell of her boss (Andrew McCarthy) but still loves her high school sweetheart Harris (Orlando Bloom), a young cop who is studying law at night and living with his depressed mother (Margo Martindale), urging Harris to 'go steady' with Mary and forget law school to stay in Durham. The human factor enters: there is an accident of one truck hauling canisters (and event that changes the outlook of the wannabe entrepreneur Leroy), Mary's boss is married, and the concept of 'progress' in the decaying town of Durham changes along with the changes in the folk involved in the story.

Aside from failing to involve the audience in the story or the characters, the conundrum is why would such a stellar cast of brilliant actors (Colin Firth, Patricia Clarkson, Ellen Burstyn, Orlando Bloom) sign on for such an obvious box office disaster (it is yet to be released)? One can only assume that it was an homage to the memory of the brilliant writer Horton Foote. It is a shame this screenplay is the last note of the legacy he left us.

Grady Harp