...comes front loaded with comedy, a recommended bill of bit performers including the sure-handed Jeff Daniels and Catherine O'Hara, reprising a few notes on stupendously unreliable parenthood from The Squid and the Whale and Orange County, the show-stopping Allison Janney aka Juno's stepmom (and a person of significance on The West Wing, a show I'm not aware of anyone ever watching) as a live wire mother of alarming insouciance, and Jim Gaffigan in a rare film appearance funny for his retiring grumble (perhaps a character of his he couldn't easily shoehorn into stand-up).
Then somehow Mendes blunders into a middle vignette that is just rubbish, as if his compass of instincts momentarily passed a transformer. Oh, my dear Maggie G...you and your brother aren't really good for much besides the perversely infantile, are you? "No, sir," she purred.
After Madison Mendes regains himself and, as if a little embarrassed by the episode, hangs up the clowning shoes in favor of his warmest and fuzziest pair of slippers. The screenplay is all sentiment in the second half, but sensible enough, and we are persuaded to believe well-observed in the way youngish lovers and misfits who've waited this long might go about inventing a narrative for themselves.
A better product on the whole than the mishandled Revolutionary Road.
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