Based on 18 votes and 1 reviews.
It's a dramatic story told from a comedic perspective; relationships end, people fail, hearts are broken, death comes calling, but all is seen, and told, from a lighter, more generous point of view, and, happily, overwrought melodrama is avoided. It's also a joyful, surreal musical. A film about fantasies, in particular the romantic fantasies of the happy drunk, and the happy womanizer, play in contemporary life; how they affect men; and how those fantasies warp men’s relationship with reality, and in turn can complicate their relationships with their families, their lovers, and others. A return to Ireland, the home of the myth of the romantic drunk, seems like a decent enough next stumble. Fantasy understandably plays a big part in life. Reality can be unpleasant, it often refuses to fit with one’s hopes and dreams, and the urge to escape is powerful and universal. Of course, there's no escape, and eventually every fantasy and each life comes to the same end; dead as a doornail! Happily, this grim fact need not be so grim, and one point of our surprisingly happy story about death is that life can be beautiful when fantasies are allowed to die. The film concerns many of our ongoing interests; relationships between fathers/mothers and sons/daughters; unromantic depictions of addiction, sobriety, and the life-long effects of childhood trauma; the work of Leonard Cohen, the limitations of cinema in particular, and art in general, in depicting reality. This movie deals with a basic human experience; the continuous struggle to see the world for what it's, to see one’s life for what it's, and that wonderful, clear, brief moment when you suddenly know yourself and your world, and understand that you're an idiot; and that wonderful truth sets you free. It’s father’s day and everyone is wounded, and the world is understandably filled with stories of bad dads and lousy mom. In the end, makes their lives and their worlds whole. (Gregory Mann)