![]() Jean and Einar have been estranged since the accidental death of Griffin, Einar's son, which he has always blamed on Jean. With nowhere else to go, she and her young daughter, Griff (Becca Gardner), travel to the ranch owned by Jean's father-in-law, Einar (Robert Redford). Jean Gilkyson (Jennifer Lopez) is a single mom on the run from her abusive boyfriend, Gary (Damian Lewis). Lasse Hallstrom (CHOCOLATE, CIDER HOUSE RULES) directs an all-star cast in this melancholy tale of bitterness and redemption, played out against the beautiful backdrop of rural Wyoming.Hallstrom is good at making little moments register, of giving them their proper importance and truth. Every day, Einar helps his ranch hand dress and gives him a shot of morphine to keep his pain at bay. Though the specter of the nutty boyfriend hangs vaguely over the proceedings, the movie mainly deals with things like the granddaughter coming down for breakfast, and moments turn on whether grandpa will let her play in the tree house. "An Unfinished Life" is all about the people. Thus, Redford remains true to the character he's playing, while providing audiences with the unique experience of watching Redford and missing him at the same time. Einar starts off a crank and ends up a crank. At no point does a smile of amused recognition light up his face, nor is there a moment when he gets seriously outraged, outspoken and reasonable. To his credit, Redford doesn't rely on Redfordisms to play Einar. (This is not to be confused with the head case who was beating her up in "Enough.") Jean needs a place to hide, and she brought along her daughter ( Becca Gardner), Einar's granddaughter, whom he didn't even know existed. Into the unending desolation that is Einar's life comes Jennifer Lopez as Jean, the wife of his late son, who is on the run from her boyfriend, a head case who keeps beating her up. He's Einar, a weather-beaten rancher who has sold his cattle and spends his days milking cows and taking care of his old ranch hand, Mitch (Morgan Freeman), who was recently mauled by a metaphor - I mean, a grizzly bear. It stars Robert Redford who, at 68, has finally broken down and played one of those crusty old cranks that his former screen partner Paul Newman has been killing audiences with for the past 10 years. Directed by Lasse Hallstrom, "An Unfinished Life" is a perfectly OK drama, with a good cast and many good scenes, but it suffers from the usual maladies that films get when they've been out on the ranch too long: all-too-obvious symbolism and a serious case of the longueurs. ![]() No, there's no way to talk about this movie without getting a little depressed, but let's just hope that what we see here is a Left Coast distortion of life in Wyoming and leave it at that. People live in the shadows of imposing nature, going about their business like ants, anticipating the day when the ground will swallow them whole. The big sky, the big landscapes and the big mountains are there, all quite impressive, but in "An Unfinished Life," they aren't images of grand possibility but crushing emblems of human smallness. Next time you fly coast to coast, take a moment to look out the window and hope that the people you're flying over, in the middle of the country, aren't quite as miserable as the folks in "An Unfinished Life." The movie paints a bleak picture of people getting up every morning like zombies, drinking coffee and talking about the weather, living in either boredom or emotional agony, and enduring all in silence as though silence were cool.
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