skteboard11
The United States of Leland is a lovable film about a semi-detached kid named Leland P. Fitzgerald. Leland ,played by a very young Ryan Gosling, has an "awkward" look on life to say the least. He never sees his father and his girlfriend is a heroin addict.This movies time-line is all messed up, in all honesty. Though I just told you the beginning of the story, you do not figure any of that out until after half of the movie is over. The true plot comes when Leland, a seemingly gentle person, commits the murder of a special needs kid. The kid was also his girlfriends brother. Well Ex- girlfriend. At this point in the movie, she had already broken little Leland's heart, which maybe one of the only scenes he shows emotion.While he is in juvenile hall, the movie jumps back and forth and seems to be trying to explain why he done what he had done. Leland meets a man who takes an interest in him. He wants to write a book about Leland. He sneaks Leland a pencil and a notebook which Leland titles The United States Of Leland. He constantly writes in this book, and when the movie is concluding, the author wanna-be decides to read the notebook. Leland wrote about how sad the world is, and how he seen the sadness the most in the kid he murdered. Of course, none of this is revealed until Leland is murdered in Juvenile hall by a close family friend to the victim.Do You agree? disagree? Whatever the case, make sure you watch this movie knowing it uses the word 'retard' a lot. Just a warning.Gavin Johns, Wanna-Be critic,
[email protected]
uncertain
OK, so there's this kid who had a not-so-great life and, like, did this bad thing. He goes to a kiddie-jail and makes friends with his teacher. His teacher does some good things, but he also does some bad thing, too. But not, like, as bad as the things the kid did, but, like, still bad things. And then some, like, stuff happens, and like, you never really find out why. It's there just to be there. Like, the end. Garbage. Total garbage. Anybody who says this is a movie worth watching forgot how to see junk when it's staring them in the face.
[email protected]
This movie is like reading an 8th grader's goth poetry: self-important, self-indulgent, and hyper dramatic, death is so romantic, heroin use is so cool, and I'm so deep and important because I'm sad. Actually, it's worse than reading junior high goth poetry.I am a huge fan of Ryan Gosling and he was terrible here. It's a minor feat to make Gosling unwatchable, but they did it. This film is not deep or profound, but indulgent and false. I challenge anyone to find a more clichéd role in film than Kevin Spacey's writer character who abandons his son, then sits in a hotel bar with a bottle of scotch solo, or worse, sits in his car with a voice recorder and says, "there was a time when we moved through life, with something like electricity..." . Laughable.Here's the story for you: Leland, a weird, squeaky voiced misfit who appears to be missing a few points of articulation in his body (Gosling) begins to date a super cool hipster music junkie (Mallone) and then she dumps him. This sends Gosling out of orbit, and he stabs to death Mallone's retarded brother. Then Leland goes to juvie and has really deep conversations with Don Cheadle and another detainee. Cheadle is a failed writer who wants to write about Leland because he's so fascinating, and who can argue that a semi-retarded squeaky voiced kid shuffling his feet and looking like he has to take a dump is not fascinating? Cheadle confronts Leland's missing dad, Spacey, cheats on his girlfriend because he wants to do bad things and gains Insight. Leland writes a surefire best-seller diary and gives it to Cheadle, then gets knifed in the yard by Chris Klein. Klein is the live-in boyfriend of Mallone's sister. He gets dumped, and then overwhelmed when Leland knifes the kid, so decides to get locked up in juvie to have a go at Leland. Wow, all these parts, these machinations, it's like a Swiss watch! Um... no.When Klein finally knifes Leland, he says off-camera "it's over." But it isn't. You still have to watch some closeups of Leland, because he's so profound, and tragic, and he's like a saint or an angel come to earth to tell us about our sad lives. That's what having your first girlfriend dump you will do. You'll all go out and stab retarded kids in the park, because, see, life is so heavy and we're all ignoring the sadness.Meanwhile, the characters all repeat dialogue about "making mistakes" and "doing nothing wrong" and somewhere buried in all this is the conceit that we all make mistakes. WOW, you didn't see that one coming, did you?This movie is not good. Don't waste your time.
Merwyn Grote
Leland in this case is Leland P. Fitzgerald. As played with a certain beyond-his-years solemness by Ryan Gosling, Leland is a high school loner with a nondescript divorced mother (Lena Olin) and a globe-trotting absentee father (Kevin Spacey), who, as a famed novelist, seems as equally proud of being considered a bastard as he is of being considered a genius. Though from a privileged family that is somewhat less than perfect, Leland seems to be a really nice sixteen-year-old. But, as THE UNITED STATES OF LELAND eventually gets around to making clear, it seems that Leland, despite having a gentle and quiet soul, has violently and inexplicably murdered a mentally impaired teenage boy, who also happened to be the younger brother of the girl Leland had been seeing. The question -- as Leland redundantly points out -- is "why?" The answer which seems apparent as the story ultimately unfolds is that the hapless and despondent Leland sees himself in the young autistic boy and the act is a form of suicide. He assumes that Ryan feels the same emptiness, isolation and worthlessness and therefore would be better off dead, but the one Leland really wanted to see die was Leland. It doesn't take a Freud to piece this together, though the film never quite gets around to finding this conclusion as writer-director Matthew Ryan Hoge is too busy dissecting the concept to the American family and chopping the institution into jagged, disconnected little pieces.Despite a title that promises unity and a storyline that seems to be seeking honesty, understanding and forgiveness, LELAND -- as is the way of most modern drama seeking "truth" -- gives way to predictable cynicism and a frustrating lack of insight. Unity is the last thing the film seeks, instead giving us glimpses of people and families in various states of disintegration. Most specifically, the Pollards, the family of the young boy that Leland murders. The film introduces the Pollard family piecemeal, taking its time to establish that the various characters are even related at all. There is a suggestion that they are a typical upper-middle-class suburban family, but by the end the feeling is that they are little more than related strangers living in the same house. Rather that having a death in the family bring them together, it only seems to weaken their tenuous bonds further. I suppose that this is meant to parallel the lack of closeness in Leland's family, but the result only creates an emotional vacuum. The film's message, if indeed it has one, is that family is an illusion -- at least in contemporary America.But the story's chief aim is get viewers to pity poor Leland -- and thanks to Gosling's lowkey performance the character is certainly ingratiating enough. But the film tries to convince us that the real victim here is not the kid he killed, but Leland himself, that Leland is so very, very special that his facing judgement for his crime is somehow unjust. To this end, the film dishonestly downplays not just the crime, but the true victim; granting young Ryan Pollard (Michael Welch) little screen time to either be recognized as a character or to garner viewer sympathy. Perhaps the intent was to show how life has marginalized Ryan because he is autisitic (that's how Leland sees him), but in all likelihood, the filmmakers just didn't want Ryan competing with Leland for sympathy, because Leland would surely lose. But trivializing the younger boy's importance in the story backfires; by refusing to create anything more than vague parallels between the boys, the film denies the only logic that would give it any depth. THE UNITED STATES OF LELAND is a well acted and superficially well directed, but like Leland P. Fitzgerald, it is strangely unemotional, cold and empty.
