Michael Mayer’s passionate film got unnoticed by nearly everybody – and it’s a crying shame. Based on a novel by Michael Cunningham (who also wrote the screenplay), A Home at the End of the World is concerned with friends and more-than-friends and family and pseudo-family which, in a word, is all about love and its limits.
Starring a next-to-incredible Colin Farrell as Bobby, a quirky Robin Wright Penn as Clare and Dallas Roberts as the tragic Jonathan, this film explores several different relationships throughout the lives of three people – in the space of one and a half hours on screen they are all lovers and friends with each other.
The film opens on the two men as young boys in Cleveland who become quick friends in high school. The two become closer than friends, experimenting with each other sexually, revealing both Jonathan’s homosexuality and Bobby’s live-and-let-love attitude.
Once Bobby loses his father, and all that’s left of his family, he moves in with Jonathan’s family and becomes their adopted son of sorts. Jonathan’s parents are played by Sissy Spacek and Matt Frewer, in understated yet effective performances.
When high school ends, Jonathan escapes Cleveland and searches for a life in New York City while Bobby stays with the parents in Cleveland. A few years later, Bobby makes his way to the Big City as well, finding Jonathan and his roommate Clare. Bobby’s presence both completes this threesome and complicates it; before long, Clare and Bobby are in love and so are Jonathan and Bobby. The two men are like brothers, sharing the parents and the same past.
This is the film’s conflict – how much love is too much? And what promises are made by actions rather than words? Is three always company, or can there be exceptions to the rule? Even though the film weasels out of answering this last question with one particularly hasty resolution, the point is made and the discussions are fused by film’s end.
Mayer does not do much with this film in regards to the direction, and that’s meant as a compliment. This is a story that belongs to the actors and the lines they were hired to deliver. It feels a lot like the smallest kind of Linklater film – in the way that the viewer knows even though the camera isn’t impressive every minute of the film, the director knew every moment of every scene thing and made it all his own without ever being pretentious about it.
That kind of cinematic naturalism is rare, and has always been so. It is on display in full force here, and on the cheap – the movie cost 6.5 million to make. Farrell proves he is, and has always been, a rare talent and Penn commands a role that is both extremely youthful and extremely aged.
Meanwhile, Mayer delivers in his directorial debut on a script written by the author of the novel, a hit-or-miss assignment that, in this case, was a spot-on hit. Cunningham knows how films are different from books and puts it on display with this kind of writing.
Thank God he had actors good enough for the words.