Flashbacks Of A Fool
May 8, 2008A good film from the first time film director Baillie Walsh who also penned the script as well.
The story is quite well done and starts off great showing the innocence of childhood then immediately showing how the main character Joe, played by Daniel Craig , has turned out with the excess of women and drugs. Great acting by Craig in these early scenes and I do have to mention his body- even as a straight man it is eye catching!
The continuous flashback then to his childhood has some excellent acting by Harry Eden as young Joe, Jodhi May as Evelyn, and Felicity Jones as young Ruth who are the main characters at this stage. The rawness of Evelyn’s attraction to Joe is quite well played and of course is the downfall of Joe’s character. There are a couple titillating scenes during the flashback between Joe and Evelyn but the funniest scene has got to be Joe and his friend Boots wanking in the in the haunted house ride at the carnival.
I did think that the film would have more of a musical bent to it but alas there was only one real scene where David Bowie’s songs played a part- that was extremely well done though and is the most memorable part of the film for me. The rest of the story for this period was fairly well done and even though I knew what was going to happen to Evelyn’s daughter from the trailer it was heavily foreshadowed.
The film really falls down though when Joe leaves town and we are brought back to the present with Craig returning to England. While you know that Joe had left you don’t know what happened at all during this time and quite a bit of this part of the film is filling in the blanks for you which doesn’t really work well. Although I am not going to complain about seeing Keeley Hawes (as Joe’s younger sister) and Claire Forlani as the present day Ruth- the scene with Keeley and the slow walk up to Claire was another standout moment.
The last scene of the film with Joe returning to LA seemed a bit odd- it didn’t particularly show that Joe had changed at all…not that all questions have to be answered but I think it would have had a better ending leaving it out.
Overall it was a good film and there were some memorable scenes- as I said I thought that music was going to play more of a role and I wish it had since there were lots of moments that had just a forgettable backing soundtrack- even silence would have been better than that.
