The Details (2012)

Jeff Lang (Tobey Maguire) seems to have it all, a great career, beautiful family...and then it starts to fall apart: Raccoons tear up his new lawn. This drives him crazy and is just the first of many bad things that happen, all leading up to coldblooded murder.This is a dark comedy with many funny and silly moments and just as many bizarre and absurd ones. Maguire is good as the Everyman character, but I thought Elizabeth Banks, who plays his wife, was too teenage-Barbie doll-ish. Dennis Haysbert is Jeff's loyal best friend and Laura Linney steals the show as his pathetic, loony neighbor.There are lots of twists and turns and it was fun to watch until the end, which just stops, like the director ran out of time and told everyone to go home. The non-ending almost spoils a good movie and left me unsatisfied.

I don't think there is a single thing funny about this film. As someone else said, "The War of the Roses" is a great dark comedy, this is just dark. The acting was terrible, especially Laura Linney, who is a great actress, which suggests that she was being directed to go over the top and to play it far too broadly. She seemed to be in a different film at times. No one comes out of this film well though, I don't know what any of them were thinking. It might have been different with James McAvoy in the lead, because that guy can out-act Tobey Maguire with his hands tied, but I think he was smarter to get out of it.SPOILER:Aside from already loathing the film, but being in a position where I couldn't turn it off because other people were watching it too, except the friend who'd fallen asleep on my shoulder, the very worst part of this film was how it used animals within its pathetic storyline. The crazy neighbor, Laura Linney, loses her cat supposedly to the poison Tobey Maguire put out for the raccoons, and she shows it to him, taking its dead body out of the fridge where she's keeping it in an open, decorated box as if it were a cake, emphasizing her crazy cat lady looniness. Weak. Later Tobey Maguire deliberately runs his car at a raccoon on the road, hits it, and backs up to hit it again. The dead raccoon is then the backdrop to the couple arguing with each other. Anyone who finds this comic is just a sick jerk and anyone who ever deliberately tries to hit an animal when I'm around is not someone I would ever speak to again.

Tobey Maguire (miscast, got no business playing opposite anybody as hot as Elizabeth Banks, but still it sort of works) is a doctor who gets himself in what appears to be a minus five sit-com. The absurdity had me wanting to get up and leave 4 or 5 times, but just when I thought all was beyond hope, Toby uses his Prius to commit the murder of an errant raccoon, and confesses everything including complicity in a murder, to his wife. It is an absolutely outstanding scene, and lifted me up out of the muck I'd been wallowing in.Suffice it to say that his troubles are initiated by the continuing irritant of excessive bureaucratic government regulations and social pressures (he lives in Seattle and the Prius has an Obama sticker on the bumper, and he's even afraid to hose a raccoon much less shoot it. Guns...ick.) After reciting the litany of his transgressions and betrayals to her in the car, he says, "OK, so far that's the good news". The last 10-15 minutes are priceless and worth the muck to get there. Elizabeth Banks is superb in that scene, and Laura Linney is great throughout as the neurotic, obnoxious next door neighbor. There is also a good scene with Ray Liotta that sort of sets up Maguire's catharsis.Could also be titled, "The Devil is in the Details", "No Good Deed Goes Unpunished", "The Truth Shall Set You Free--Sort Of", or "Wherefore Absolution?". The philosophical and moral issues it raises could start at least half a dozen arguments all by themselves.EDIT ADD: I watched this a second time and, knowing what happens makes the first part not seem so sit-com....ish. The excellent scene with Liotta on the Skagit R. Bridge starts the second half of the movie which justifies the first. I don't know what could be done to fix it, except maybe make sure people watch the preview first, which I hadn't. Whatever, just watch it! This could actually become a cult classic, something we haven't had many worthwhile examples of for a good while.

Dejavu... that's the word that comes to my mind when I finished this movie... this movie reminded me a great deal of 'American Beauty' due to its technique and dramatization... American Beauty has a way different story, but both of those movies get to you in a similar manner... how one event of least importance can turn your whole world up-side-down in time to comes, the details tells you about that very convincingly... The acting has been tremendous... Other than the spiderman series I have known Tobey Mcguire from the cider house rules, in which his acting was commendable... but the details has a different character for him to tackle and he did it quite well... Laura Linney and Elizabeth Banks are veterans and I do not recall them throwing away their character every before... but the best thing about this movie is the screenplay... hats off to the writer who knows how to whirl the story through the time streams gently... every act was calculated and didn't feel like unnecessary or miscalculated at all... My recommendations... do see it!