Some films keep you constantly at arms length, never allowing you into their characters' lives, because it's more important to make a point or create a mood than to tell a story. Then there are films that take you in their arms, invite you to spend some time getting to know and care about their characters, and when they're over, you don't want to let them go. It would be so easy to become snarky about Michael Mayer's gentle treatment of Michael Cunningham's screenplay based on his novel A HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD. After all, isn't it every woman's ultimate fantasy -- to live in an adorable house in Woodstock, New York, with a charming, witty, cute gay guy AND Colin Farrell (only not the smokin' drinkin' playboy of the tabloids, but a cute, endearing, puppylike version of Colin Farrell who knows how to cook and change diapers AND is handy around the house)?. But HOME is so much more. Like Cunningham's The Hours, it's an exploration of the notions of love and family and connection, only with far more appealing characters who are far less self-indulgent.

Unlike the relentlessly insufferable therapy junkies, navel gazers, and tortured artists of The Hours, here Cunningham gives us three people who similarly carry huge loads of baggage, but instead of analyzing their neuroses to death, they, like most of us, simply try to muddle through, trying to make rules that work for them and learning that what works in one moment may not in another.

Bobby (played as a teenager by Erik Smith and as an adult in a performance by Colin Farrell that's nothing short of astonishing) is a sensitive soul, damaged by the horrific death of his beloved older brother and soon after by his mother and then his father. "I'm the last of my line," this kid barely old enough to shave says. His closest friend Jonathan (played first by Harris Allan and then by newcomer Dallas Roberts) is clearly gay at an early age, something that in Cleveland Ohio in the 1970's, wasn't an easy thing to be. Jon is attracted to Bobby because of his kindness and sensitivity, and Bobby is one of those people who just wants to make people happy. Eventually, Bobby finds himself moving in with Jon and his roommate Clare (Robin Wright Penn), an aging hippie milliner far too old to be the spritely iconoclast she insists on remaining. The three of them all eventually end up in love with each other, but instead of living happily ever after in their unconventional family (which is what we in the audience want so desperately for them), they learn that nothing stays the same, relationships change, and we may not always want what we think we did.

This is the kind of character study that lives and dies by its performances, and the cast here is uniformly first-rate. Newcomer Dallas Roberts brings Jonathan's roiling ambivalence about his relationship with his birth family and his manufactured one to vivid life, even if other aspects of his character are less well-developed. Robin Wright-Penn, who is beginning to be typecast as fortyish, sharp, brittle women, develops Clare into a kind of muse for both men; a catalyst who serves to bring together two men who seem to be soulmates for each other, but alas, not for her.

Sissy Spacek, a terrific actress who seems only now that she's older to be finally finding the kind of meaty, if small roles she deserves, is the embodiment of every woman who came of age in the immediate aftermath of World War II. She is the archetypal postwar housewife, but in a riveting and electrically-charged scene in which she finds herself profoundly affected by the mournful voice of Laura Nyro and ends up smoking pot with her young son, the aforementioned Jonathan, and Bobby. This is the kind of woman for whom The Feminine Mystique was written.

It's interesting to note the contrast between Erik Smith's portrayal of the adolescent Bobby with Farrell's adult. At sixteen, Smith makes Bobby a highly charismatic and magnetic individual, who is either naturally ingratiating or highly manipulative. In the pot-smoking scene described above, at times it feels almost like a seduction, as if Bobby is an empath who can sense the yearning behind Alice's relentless baking. Yet by age 24, at which point Farrell takes over the role, Bobby seems more damaged, wearing the optimism he inherited from his brother far more hesitantly than at sixteen.

Yet it's Farrell who anchors the film, in a performance that seems to be surprising everyone but ought to surprise no one, for this guy is the real deal. Cursed with undoubtedly a great agent who managed to turn him into a celebrity even before making him a movie star, Farrell is all these things, but most of all he's an actor, and a damn fine one at that. Farrell has appeared in some real stinkers, such as American Outlaws, Daredevil, and Phone Booth -- and except for some unevenness with accents, has been at the very least charismatic and often more. He may not have the chops of a Brando -- it's too early to tell -- but he has the same ability to take over the screen with sheer magnetism and to truly understand a more complex character. It's to his credit that with his kind of macho bad boy reputation, he's confident enough to take on this kind of sexually ambiguous role. Bobby is the kind of role in which we would expect to see one of the current crop of "sensitive actors" -- Tobey Maguire, perhaps, or Jake Gyllenhaal, or Joaquin Phoenix. Any of these guys could have played this character in their sleep. But BECAUSE Farrell is so magnetic, it makes Bobby's vulnerability that much more affecting. Erik Smith as the younger Bobby seems to understand this as well, and it makes the trajectory of this characterization that much more real.

A HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD is almost Russian in its sensibility, in which love and death nearly always go hand in hand, and joy is always tempered by pain. There's nothing particularly special or memorable about either the direction or the cinematography, and the choices of music from the period in which the early scenes take place sometimes seems not to quite fit, though one must be grateful to director Mayer for choosing some of the less ubiquitous examples of music from the era. The costumes, however, in the early part of the film, leave something to be desired. Granted that the 1960's and early 70's were some of the silliest years in fashion history, the costuming here sometimes seems tailor-made for being a target on VH1's I Love the [decade] series.

This sort of character study, like films such as The Station Agent and You Can Count on Me, to which it will inevitably be compared, rely on character development, performance, and screenplay to be successful. Thanks to Cunningham's deft adaptation of his novel, stellar performances by a seamlessly enmeshed ensemble cast, and the emergence of Colin Farrell as a Real Actor, A HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD is a quiet oasis in a noisy, frenetic Hollywood summer.

-- Jill Cozzi

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