The Brutal Truth -- 2000 -- R

This movie was referenced by a guy who was wondering if I could write a screenplay in a similar vein, so I thought I'd give it a viewing. This is primarily a character drama where a bunch of old friends head out to one of their friend's mountain home for a reunion. Once they all get there, their host is not present, and they wonder where she is. Well, she comes in later and commits suicide before anyone can talk to her, so now they're left to figure out why.

This movie has its ups and downs throughout the narrative. Sometimes, it's paced fairly well, and sometimes, the boredom of where they are comes through very painfully. The gist is at the moment their friend kills herself, there is a rock slide of some kind which completely blocks off the top of the mountain with the rest of the world, so they are left with their friend's corpse until the authorities can come and make their report. So everyone is left to re-acquaint and work out their differences.

Obviously, a situation like this is ripe for some drama, but rather than explore everyone's characters as extensively as they could, time is devoted to some strange antics and side plots, most notably, the weird sub-plot of stealing the neighbor's dog in the hopes he'll post for a reward, which is done way too quickly. This is done to get money for drugs which leads me to another complaint.

These are supposed to be adults, and while I understand that everyone has their situations, the emphasis is similar to the slew of Friday the 13th movies I'm going through where half the cast is all about sex and drug use. Part of me is wondering when Jason will come wandering through the woods to hack a couple of them up.

So how'd we do with the characters here? Well, it runs slow in places and gets unfocused at times, but on the whole, we get a pretty fair sense of the characters and their personalities and situations. Many of them experience growth during the course of the story as a result of being stuck together, and it ends on a very satisfying note for everyone involved, including the one who killed herself, as that is explained very satisfactorily. Another title for this film is "The Giving Tree," and yes, the Shel Silverstein book is referenced.

Everyone is pretty much their own person and while not everyone is three dimensional, most everyone is at least 2 dimensional with some personal characteristics and a little knowledge of who they are, and even where they came from in some cases. One couple comes out with their dirty landry and grows in a climactic moment for them. It's really not bad, but with so many characters, we could have used fewer fluff scenes and more about the character scenes.

Vanilla/Paula is probably the most memorable, though she was painted the thinnest of all of the characters. She was the comic relief in this film and played her naiveity rather amusingly. It was a bit over the top at times, but as we kept rolling, she was given a little personality.

The biggest problem in this whole thing is that one person knew the reason their friend killed herself. It wasn't anything that involved everyone, but just a couple of people. It factored heavily into one character's story, but only that one. It hit one relationship. Basically everyone else was fodder to give us characters to interact with, but the brutal truth is that we could have dropped some characters and still had a complete story without them. That's definitely problematic.

A final note of weirdness is the arrival of the final character of the "reunitees." We get this big explanation of the phones being out and the road being covered, and then someone else arrives, and we're left wondering, "How'd he get here if the road is blocked?"

It does have a good, tied-up happy ending, and the premise is interesting. So it's not a bad film, but just one that makes a good effort to build up some characters yet does so at such an uneven pace that it gets boring to watch at times.