Flashbacks of a Fool Details

[Highly rated reviewer]

Thank God For The Flashbacks

I'm a fan of Daniel Craig, but unfortunately I found his performance, as the faded Hollywood star extremely disappointing. With no links on how he changed from a young tearaway to a successful actor?? Luckily Craig isn't in much of the film. As ridiculous as it sounds, the flashbacks to his younger years, save the movie, with brilliant performances from Harry Eden, playing the young Daniel Craig and a super sexy turn from Felicity Jones.

I do have to admit that the film grew on me, even if it took a few days to sink in. There's a brilliant soundtrack, some interesting storylines and the whole look and feel of the movie is captivating.

Definitely worth a watch, 70's Glam nostalgia is brilliant and its all pretty damn good to look at.

Vulnerable to depression? Dont watch...

I watched this film because I like Daniel Craig being an actual 'actor' rather than his more lucrative Bond turns and the film sounded like my kinda thing - an involving evocative drama...but this is a very odd, and very cold, fish.

Basic plotline - washed up, drugged out, Hollywood star (Craig) is having a bit of a mid-life crisis and remembers events in his early 1970s adolescence that led him to run away from his small seaside-town home. Bulk of movie is taken up with this 'flashback' and then you see Craig's attempt at achieving some kind of redemption and closure.

Now some people may love this (but avoid if you are a Daniel Craig fan cause besides getting a very lovely look at him in naked form in the opening scene he's not in the bulk of the film - only making 'bookend' appearances at the beginning and end) but what I made of this nostalgia fest is that it just isnt anywhere near as good as it thinks it is... Yes, it looks beautiful, it has lovely understated performances throughout it, the 'flashback' scenes are filmed with a fragile almost bleached out hue which really evokes teenage memories, and the use of the Roxy Music track is simply stunning, but yet the end result is still incredibly sterile. It's not that you can't empathise with May's lonely and affection-starved housewife or that you can't see a bored disillusioned adolescent boy indulging in her sexual suggestions, it's just that you end up not being really sure what was the real issue that was weighing on the protagonists mind all these years...whilst watching I found myself thinking 'ah - he feels guilt over the death of the child...of course!' but yet when he returns home from Hollywood it seems to be about atonement and regret for losing and leaving the girl he was supposed to meet that night, and that the great tragic consequence of his actions that fateful evening was not the death of the child but that he lost his first love and left her to his bestfriend...yet apart from a magnificent scene where they mime to Roxy Music you never had any feeling that this was really a significant relationship or 'first love' and certainly not a relationship which would hold enough resonance for her to be that bothered about it 30+ years later when she's in the midst of burying her husband - perhaps it would be more effective if on return home Craig discovered that the significance he has held in these events and the loss he has perceived are purely his? I don't know...I just didn't buy it.

I get that it's a film about consequence and the effect our casual choices can have on those around us - and it's not that it isnt effective in it's way, but instead of being the great evocative drama that it should have been it's kind of a dark empty little tale that left me quite 'down' for sometime afterwards - it's just less than the some of it's parts...