You may have seen some of his other films including The Shipping News, Something to Talk About (I had a short-lived crush on Dennis Quaid, too, in college!) and What’s Eating Gilbert Grapewith a ridiculously talented young actor called Leonardo Di Caprio! So, how come, HOW COME, I did not hear of An Unfinished Life when it hit movie theaters?
Then he got into film directing and made some of my favorite films from the late 1990s and early 2000s including The Cider House Rules and Chocolat. Well, because even though I was not a Damian Lewis fan back in 2005, I certainly was a fan of Hallström’s cinema, I still am, and I would watch the movie just because Hallström had his name on it.įor those of you that do not know him, Lasse Hallström is a Swedish film director that first came to fame having made all ABBA music videos. Honestly, I was surprised finding out An Unfinished Life was a Lasse Hallström movie when I watched it last year. Damian stars in the movie along with Jennifer Lopez as well as two giants of the big screen, Robert Redford and Morgan Freeman. He's not happy to see either of them.Today we revisit Damian Lewis in An Unfinished Life, a movie directed by Lasse Hallström based on a novel by Mark Spragg who also wrote the script with his wife Virginia Korus Spragg. (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.