Thanks to the film for introducing the young actor Paul Dano, who in skill, it seems, is not inferior to his partner – Hollywood veteran Robert de Niro. As always, the charming Julianne Moore also played brilliantly, although not the main role. The tape sincerely and convincingly shows the “bottom” of the American metropolis, which is easy to slide, but not easy to get out of it. There is something to learn in the picture - will, optimism, comradeship, reasoning ... The film is full of impressive episodes, but the most vivid, in my opinion, are those related to the shelter, where the young hero is forced to work, and his father languishes as an unwitting client.
The underestimation of this film is another proof that the genre drama - is not for everyone (like thrillers). “Being Flynn” is a film based on real events, the key role of which is the play of actors.
Robert De Niro, I think as an actor, in this film opened in a way that has not been opened in a long time. Acting in action movies, he played great, but in this film, like a true De Niro. Paul Dano is a great actor, whom I saw in such films as “12 years a slave”, “Little Miss happiness” and several more. This is the first movie I’ve seen where he plays a major role. He’s not invited to make great movies because he stands out. He is invited because of his acting skills and talent. Of course, against the background of De Niro, I did not see anything incredible in his game, but he made me write his name in my head and follow his films further.
The plot of the film begins when Nick Flynn (Paul Dano) wants to get a job in a homeless shelter. He is asked what family he has, and he answers: “Mom died, and from his father for 18 years no news.” After a while, his father calls him, asking for help packing. Father Jonathan Flynn (De Niro), a writer who constantly talks about a masterpiece book and tells his son that there are a lot of places where he is waiting. Nick then meets his father among the homeless, which is what shocks him. From this moment, the so-called tsunami of emotions begins, which envelopes the viewer due to the incredible De Niro and Paul Dano looking well near him.
This film can also be explained in one sentence. Being Flynn is a complicated movie that's easy to watch.
Nicholas Flynn’s life has not been easy since childhood. His own father Jonathan, a recognized genius of the literary pen, he almost did not know, and his mother gradually plunged into the world of depression. After a long 18 years in the life of Nick suddenly bursts his own father and the life of both is monstrously complicated.
The 2012 film Being Flynn is an adaptation of the memoirs of the famous American poet Nick Flynn, who told about himself, his father and the search for his creative source. Director Paul Weitz, better known for the comedy films My Boy and American Pie, appeared in this film as a strong dramatic director. “Being Flynn” is a tough and uncompromising social drama, showing the whole hellish essence of living at the bottom of society, showing destructive kinship relations and revealing from a new angle theme of creative searches and polar views.
Robert De Niro brilliantly played Jonathan, creating the image of a truly negative and destructive character. Nick Paul Dano played well, creating an equally controversial image of a person prone to self-destruction and degradation. Among the secondary characters, Julianne Moore and Olivia Thirlby should be particularly distinguished.
Composer Damon Gough wrote a very depressing and depressing soundtrack for the film, further enhancing the impression of the picture.
I recommend this hard-to-perceive film to all fans of dramas and connoisseurs of Robert De Niro’s work and I think the picture will not disappoint you and will make you think about a lot.
8 out of 10
"That's a gift!" I said to my wife when I found this movie. While there was a lot in line to watch, I couldn’t push Robert De Niro any further than the nearest spot. In recent years, not everything that Robert appeared, liked. The paintings were different and not always successful. I'd like to highlight
“Love: Instructions for use”, “Everybody’s Fine”, and the similarity with the latter is simply obvious. Family drama, intricacies of family relations, the problem of choice, and we are mainly talking about the choice of attitude to life - whether an individual will break a series of circumstances, or he will find the strength to survive hard times. But I certainly liked this movie.
“Being Flynn” brings us back to Chinese Coffee, where the problem of the “free artist” was quite capaciously sanctified. The difference is only in some aspects. Here and there we see the collision of worlds and the consequences that they cause. Detachment from reality leads to a social bottom, to an overnight “on fans”.
Jonathan Flynn (De Niro), the father of the family, has lost the line where fiction passes into your own reality, in which you begin to believe, and thereby doomed yourself to fall and degradation. All the circumstances of his life are seasoned with lies, and the truth cannot be established unless it is shown to us on the screen.
First Jonathan is evicted from the apartment, then he loses his job, then he finds himself in an orphanage, where he meets his son.
Nick Flynn (Paul Dano) is a son, a man at a crossroads who determines who he is in this world. His business is going with varying success. So when things sort of work out, and he finds a job, he meets his father there, having barely had time to adapt to the job. This pleasant surprise changed the lives of both of them once and for all. At first, the son falls into depression, begins to fall,
But the inner core will pull him and the abyss. He will also charge his father to fight.
Who will eventually be able to pull his life out of the corkscrew.
One way or another, this meeting did not allow the father and son to stay on this stage forever. The various emotional states that moved them pushed them out and guided them further through life. Nick got the opportunity to realize his literary talent, and Jonathan found a place where work on “The Hit Man” will continue.
The film does not tell us about the brilliant social life with expensive dresses, climate control cars and satellite TV, it gives terrible examples of what happens day after day under our windows, indicating the point after which a person is “beyond the line” – in every sense of the word. And it, this point, does not come into life in some solemn and gloomy way, it seems to swim by, quietly and slowly, so that any of us can notice it, make a choice... what? It's everyone's business. It was nice to see the end that the creators of the picture prepared for us.
Thank you very much.
It may not be a depiction of a single story in a Paul Weitz painting, or a demonstration of storylines, but a projection of a novel written by one of the Flynns, someone who actually exists, rather than being a figment of imagination, making ends meet, or a son who is ultimately entangled in this life. They are both characters in the book, and that’s all. Extracted drives yellowed pages of one printed work out of a thousand that no one will need, it will be lost in time and will be found somewhere in the pantry of a family whose history could be much more beautiful than the situation of the two Flynns.
The origins are always forgotten, the person was, and then he died, and this or that name on the lips can suddenly sound only once in the allotted hundred years from some distant relative. Writers have a rare gift to immortalize themselves and their loved ones in a book that may and will be in someone’s decrepit cabinet only a collector of numerous dust, but will forever remain a carrier of valuable lines of memory, allowing to exist further.
One day an aging Jonathan Flynn, after an 18-year absence, suddenly had the honor of suddenly reappearing in the life of his son Nick. The character embodied by Robert De Niro, not thinking much, not knowing about the possible presence of manners, about proper behavior in case the father decides to show himself to his son, whom he once abandoned, he simply invades Nick, taking on the arms of thoroughbred arrogance. After a single meeting, fate activated the function of repetition and began to connect relatives with each other, doing it from time to time.
Your father will always be your father, no matter how beastly he is, whether you want to know him or not, wish him dead or remain neutral. A man performed by De Niro with the words: "We are created to help someone" - it's just a collective image in an emotionally-inspired performance that without knocking entered the territory of Nick Flynn with the face of Paul Dano (who, by the way, the general appearance in the film also did not spoil), and left a mark in everyday life.
And then piled up the difficulties of the old grief writer with a distinguished masterpiece, even the titles of which no one saw in the eye. And everything went like a roller coaster: eviction, dismissal, a cold street, a shelter for the homeless. But the helper is always a dream, which produces additional heat to the freezing body. And the hero De Niro will be able to give the last strength expressive facial expression, inspiring confidence not only to himself, but also to his son along with others.
The film by Paul Weitz is set to simply tell a single situation in the life of the Flynns, which turned into a flashy red color that requires support. Father and son met when they needed each other. The film does not pretend to look like washed powder to the sunshine in the eyes of the audience, it without any concealment demonstrates the very bottom not from the point of view of floors, but from the point of view of life, not afraid to turn the part of the face that is most stained with dirt.
Nick Flynn never knew his father, Jonathan Flynn. Jonathan Flynn never knew his son, Nick Flynn. But one Flynn always knew there was another nearby. Who of them is the main character of the film by Paul Weitz and whether the second really exists is a mystery, the answer to which is hidden not in the plot collisions, but in the intonation of the plot, in the characteristics of his characters - a little template, obsessively bookish, quite realistic.
Paul Weitz, playing on the field of spit-forming tales about the triumph of family values, turns the genre scheme, throwing out everything predictable, all tearful, putting the theme of the “cursed gift” in the corner of the story. How great the talent of both Flynns we do not know, but the script accurately conveys the undoubted faith of the characters in their own desired burden of the chosen. They express it in their own way. Robert De Niro presents John with all grandioseness in his favorite psychopathic manner, juicy spewing expletives and sarcastic wisdom. Against his background are not lost, restrained in performance, Paul Dano and Julianne Moore.
Both Flynns are writers. The elder is a complacent liar who considers himself, along with Twain and Salinger, a prose genius. The younger is a downtrodden modest with a claim to a poetic gift. One has a drinking problem. The other one with drugs. One is a swindler who served time in prison, a marginal, a racist, a homophobe, a misanthrope who has degraded to bum. The second one is a lowly good man with a black friend, a gay friend, a girl who rejects oral sex, working with this girl in a homeless shelter. At this point, their paths intersect, pitting a pathetic but free-spirited old man against a noble but passive young man. Jonathan's shattered life and Nick's promising path have too many things in common. The contrasting characters are intertwined by the quirkiness of behind-the-scenes explanations, the strangeness of memories and the general sense of guilt over the death of the mother of one and the wife of the other.
To be Flynn is to be a father of your own equal, or a son of your own. The constant transfer of the narrator's baton from Nick to Jonathan as illustrated in the film scene with baseball, where the young hero receives a pitch from various friends of the mother, but his own ball addressed to the real father throws nowhere. An unambiguous hint of the illusory nature of reality, of its purely literary origin. Who created this reality, which of the two Flynns is the best storyteller? Someone who comes up with a directory to come up with a phone number for his son or someone who answers the phone of a fictional father.
Like the main characters of the story, the film does not try to please everyone. Weitz does not burden, stuffed with edge, with explanations of cause and effect. Because there are no guilty or innocent causes. Because the consequences are not reduced to vulgar repentance and sweet, all-forgiving tears. Because life is not like the books of Twain and Salinger. Tom Sawyer and Holden Caulfield live in dreams, not your life. Life is ripped and sudden. In which, today, you look down on a vagrant, and tomorrow you spend the night with him in a dumpster shelter. As long as your non-existent unfinished novel is stored in the oven, you receive a reward for a collection of non-existent, book-style poems. One of the happy endings is false and ridiculous, like a word repeated many times, like a past replayed in your head, in which you have no father, in which you have no son, in which your mother is dead, in which your wife is a ghost. Guilt must be justified, and non-existent elements invented, recorded, rhymed. It is necessary to marry and have a child to give him the tenuous right to be Flynn. To be a man who won't despise himself for being Flynn, for being his father's son.
The film is based on the memoirs of the American writer and poet Nick Flynn, in which he, in particular, describes his painful relationship with his father, who has an irrepressible bad character. Paul Weitz, the director of the legendary American Pie, began to consider the possibility of a film adaptation of the book eight years ago, and during this time, it seems, somewhat confused about what he wants to show on the screen. I do not know how things were in the original source, but the film looks very superficial, and the real story from life does not pull at all.
Nick Flynn (Paul Dano) grew up almost without a father - he was either in prison or absent for other reasons, which, among other things, did not affect the mental state of Nick's mother (Julianne Moore). Jonathan Flynn (Robert De Niro), the self-proclaimed genius of the pen, has absolutely no sympathy with the viewer. Narcissistic, rude and angry - De Niro paints the image perfectly. However, the script doesn’t care to explain why this is all motivated – we only see Jonathan’s defiant behavior, but the character has no depth, no life story, which makes it unnatural. The script only implies some excuses for him - but they remain behind the scenes. Growing up, Nick wants to write like his father, but is wildly afraid of being like him. They haven’t spoken for years, until Jonathan calls him unexpectedly to get him out of a difficult situation. A sane person who believes that his father, in fact, did not take any part in his upbringing, and that he did more harm than good in life, most likely would simply ignore this call. But Nick, for some reason, dutifully goes to the named address. This is their first meeting in years, not their last.
Meanwhile, Dano's character also seems somewhat unnatural; his character and life position are not fully revealed. He performs some chaotic actions in life, and you can not call him an attractive character either. In the film, there are many inserts from Nick's childhood, but they, in fact, do not add to the image of completeness - the fact that he grew up without a father and it affected his perception of the world we know from the beginning, we know about his mother, where all this will lead her - but that, in fact, is all. There are very superficial and unworked images here, and the film is based on the history of real people. Looking at the screen, it is hard to believe. The situation is complicated when hardened alcoholic Jonathan loses his job and housing, and begins to visit the homeless shelter where Nick recently got a job. Both are gradually degraded - Jonathan is more clearly sliding down the social ladder. Nick is less agile – he slowly starts using drugs and also leans harder on the bottle, and it becomes more difficult for him to control himself. The "fall" line Nick, by the way, is drawn completely indistinct, and does not produce the necessary emotional effect. But Jonathan burns out in full, as if deliberately doing everything possible to everyone around him turned away. Again, the script casts a shadow over his motives and fails to answer the question of what causes his selfish behavior. Father and son continue the Cold War. Jonathan tries in every possible way to remind him that his father's blood flows in his veins, from which he is horrified and furious.
What's the end result? Nothing special – peace, love, and other family values. Weitz clumsily brings the viewer to the expected banal finale, which is hardly able to boast important revelations about the problems of family relationships. There is absolutely nothing in De Niro’s character that we can respect him for, so Nick’s position seems questionable. And in general, the story looks like an hour and a half performance with cardboard dolls, having nothing to do with reality.