Great American Failures. It's a genre. John Kennedy Toole would fit
plumb into it, and so would this movie based on his posthumous novel.
Granted, it returned Gena Rowlands to cinema work – and she does light up
the screen as the mother of a very strange little boy in the Ozarks – and it
is lit through with Davies' fascination with the way in which we become
who we are, but the pairing of puckish Liverpudlian director and deeply
disturbed boondocks novelist never quite comes off. Worth watching
because it's not quite like anything else.
