Mark Reviews Movies: BOUNDARIES

Become a fan on Facebook Follow on Twitter

Review by Mark Dujsik | June 28, 2018

Here is yet another story about the dysfunctional members of a dysfunctional family, forced to be together and coming to terms with the past, the present, and the future. Like so many movies of its ilk, Boundaries is a showcase for both the screenwriter's ability to come up with quirks, as well as a series of situations in which those characteristics can clash in uncomfortable ways, and the performers' willingness to go to extremes.

In this one, the running joke is that a woman is insistent upon setting physical and emotional boundaries with her estranged father, while repeatedly making excuses to justify having him back in her life. It's also that the woman, named Laura and played by Vera Farmiga, has, perhaps, taken her efforts to distance herself from the father too far.

Her son is, well, an oddball, as at least one child in such a story must be. She wants to be the right kind of parent for the boy, although the result seems to be her being a little lax in the parenting department. She's not too lax, of course, because that would lead to negligence, which is exactly the sort of parenting situation she doesn't want her own child to endure.

The end result is that the kid gets away with a lot that would have most parents seeking out some kind of professional help. For example, the boy likes to draw pictures of the people he meets. According to him, they're portraits of the people's souls, but in actuality, they're sketches of people completely naked, with exaggerated features and surprisingly detailed depictions of genitalia. The second detail of the drawings should probably raise some flags for Laura, but hey, she has her own issues with which to deal.

Laura's major quirk is that she collects stray animals. Her home has become a boarding house for dogs and cats with all sorts of health issues and physical problems. Writer/director Shana Feste never overtly explains this hoarding behavior, but in fairness, she doesn't really need to do so. We get it: Laura was deprived of love and care for most of her life, and now, she's trying to compensate by showering abandoned animals with extraordinary amounts of love and care. It's simple, quirky, and, of course, completely irrational. The movie opens with Laura in therapy, and that, we suppose, is meant to make us feel slightly more comfortable about her behavior. It may not be working, but at least she's trying to get help.

The movie establishes these characteristics early on, and then it quickly sets up the easiest frame of a plot in which to stick such dysfunctional characters: the road trip. Laura's father Jack (Christopher Plummer) is currently in a nursing home, and after avoiding his repeated phone calls, Laura's sister JoJo (Kristen Schaal) lets her know why the old man has been calling. He's about to be kicked out of the place. See, Jack is a bit of an entrepreneur, which is the diplomatic way of saying that he's a marijuana dealer.

JoJo offers to let Jack stay with her. Laura just has to get him from Seattle to the sister's home outside Los Angeles. Jack insists that he, his daughter, and Laura's son Henry (Lewis MacDougall) make the trip in his classic car. He can't fly, after all. He has terminal cancer—or at least that's what he tells her, quite unconvincingly for anyone who seen a movie such as this. The trip is actually an excuse to make one, final series of drug deals on the road. Jack enlists his grandson to help him.

The rest of the movie features a series of encounters with Jack's old friends, Laura's louse of an ex-husband Leonard (Bobby Cannavale), and random strangers looking to buy what Jack is supplying. There are also, naturally, scenes of Laura and Jack going through the ups and downs of their tenuous relationship in a short period of time.

Most of the supporting characters are fairly useless in showing us anything about these characters. An extended scene with Jack's old pal Joey (Peter Fonda) builds toward a burglary by the friend's own grandson (whom Laura believes she stops by barging into the house with a bow and arrow). Another visit features Christopher Lloyd as another buddy, whose business in the story is basically to show up naked in front of the surprised Laura and Henry. Laura's reunion with Leonard reaffirms what we already assumed: that she's desperate for some kind of normalcy and that he's a cad.

The performances do a well enough job grounding these over-the-top characters within some semblance of reality. Farmiga's challenge is the toughest, since Feste has Laura go back and forth between her feelings about her father with suddenness and regularity. Plummer is his charming, reliable self as a father whose redemption seems to be the last thing on his mind, although that doesn't stop the movie from going there anyway. Boundaries follows a well-worn path, providing little insight and even fewer surprises along the way.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products

Buy the DVD