First shown at the Sundance Film Festival in 1999, actress-turned-director Toni Kalem's adaptation of Anne Tyler's 1969 novel about shriveling ambitions and stunted lives is a dreary mess of opaque characters doing peculiar things for inexplicable reasons. Timid Evie Decker (Lily Taylor), painfully introverted and old before her time, lives with her sad widowed father (Tom Bower) in a dying small town located somewhere between today's rural rustbelt and the early 1960s, when Tyler's novel is set. Evie's only friend, plump but vivacious Violet (Sara Rue), works at the local beauty parlor while Evie squanders her days selling hot dogs at the Kiddie Acres amusement park...
Released:
2004
Rated:
R
Length:
111 mins