I soooo wanted to like "Brigsby Bear." I saw it after coming off a string of depressing, bleak movies about people being nasty and mean to one another, and a film with a big heart full of decent characters all wanting to just do the right thing was appealing. But the screenplay for this movie is just lousy, and the film overall simply does not work because of it.
I think the film is meant to strike a satirical tone, kind of a "Napoleon Dynamite" vibe, but it's not confident enough in itself to do it well. It makes a joke out of a dark premise (a child is abducted as a baby and raised by his kidnappers until he's reunited with his birth parents a good 25 years later), which could work under the right circumstances. But it so doggedly avoids dealing with any of the emotional or even just procedural collateral that would come with such a story in its interest to make everything happen easily and neatly. It's like a college student wrote a term paper about a subject he knows nothing about and didn't feel like researching.
Greg Kinnear and Mark Hammill are the most recognizable faces that show up in this one. I would add Jane Adams to the list, but she's in a teensy-tiny part of the movie at the very beginning and is never seen again. I know she's not necessarily a major star, but she's a recognizable enough actress that one wonders if there are additional scenes of her that were left on the cutting room floor.
Grade: C+
I think the film is meant to strike a satirical tone, kind of a "Napoleon Dynamite" vibe, but it's not confident enough in itself to do it well. It makes a joke out of a dark premise (a child is abducted as a baby and raised by his kidnappers until he's reunited with his birth parents a good 25 years later), which could work under the right circumstances. But it so doggedly avoids dealing with any of the emotional or even just procedural collateral that would come with such a story in its interest to make everything happen easily and neatly. It's like a college student wrote a term paper about a subject he knows nothing about and didn't feel like researching.
Greg Kinnear and Mark Hammill are the most recognizable faces that show up in this one. I would add Jane Adams to the list, but she's in a teensy-tiny part of the movie at the very beginning and is never seen again. I know she's not necessarily a major star, but she's a recognizable enough actress that one wonders if there are additional scenes of her that were left on the cutting room floor.
Grade: C+