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OwnLyingEyesAugust 16, 2024

Personally found the Mary Lamb character made a lot of sense and was pretty sympathetic, not saintly exactly so much as lost. Because she was someone who had built her whole life around sacrificing for her son (working and LIVING at a school almost entirely full of pampered, entitled rich white boys/men would have been lonely as hell, her sister lived pretty far away and got the impression they rarely saw each other, she didn't have her own car, and didn't seem to really have real friends there), made him her world and her purpose, and then he died, senselessly, and all of those years devoted resolutely towards giving him opportunities to achieve his full potential were for what? And what now?

But agree with Amareldys, for the most part I experienced it as one of those comedies that detours into dark, painful places and enjoyed it, despite it very much being focused on a man and a boy veering towards becoming slightly less dysfunctional people. And isn't it funny how much something striking as comedy or not changes EVERYTHING about the experience?

EmmaGildedAugust 16, 2024

I think Mary Lamb was very well performed but not very well written in that the movie isn’t that interested in her as a person, or even in her tragic story and her dead son. I felt that she and her grief were just a foil to the story were there for, of how a lost sad man and a lost sad boy helped each other grow up.

OwnLyingEyesAugust 16, 2024

The thing is though, think there aren't many ways to write a character having that experience all that differently that wouldn't be a bit inauthentic; think realistically bereaved characters almost always need to rely heavily on acting rather than writing alone. That kind of grief walls people off and is all-consuming. There's a lot of silence in it, a lot of isolation, a lot of people not knowing what to say and so either not saying anything or constantly saying the 'wrong' thing (because there isn't really a right thing that will make it better, just a lot of things that will make it feel worse) that can make 'company' unbearable. For her, finally getting to the point of being able to let go symbolically, just a little bit, and finally deciding to reach out and reconnect to the world of the living in a meaningful way, to her family instead of the two male clowns of the story, letting some of that pain out, is a huge turning point and personally it worked for me as a character arc. And she was maybe a foil to a degree if you see the relationship between sad man and sad boy as the point, but alternatively she also was one corner of a trifecta in the theme, reconnecting to humanity from a place of feeling alienated, isolated, unwanted, forgotten, alone (with all three starting in that place of exile due to a combination of factors in and out of their control and all three eventually coming to a place of changing what they're able to change and in the process seeking and making meaningful connections with others).

EmmaGildedAugust 17, 2024

What can I say. My feeling, watching the film, was that the elements were there, but didn’t add up. I understood that I was supposed to see the character this way, as I understood I was supposed to see all the characters a certain way, and I just didn’t. That it worked for you and didn’t work for me makes it better art than I thought.

ToNorthAugust 17, 2024

Sounds like she should of been the protagonist of this story and who it revolved around. Powerful stuff, would have been more meaningful.

[Deleted]August 17, 2024

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