A raft of fine actors -- including Amy Adams, Richard Jenkins, and Downton Abbey's Jessica Brown Findlay -- are wasted in a sour, callow family drama that mistakes constant yelling for emotional tension and fortune-cookie aphorisms for wisdom.
Lullaby
What do you say when everything has been left unsaid?
2014 · 1h 57m · R
Drama
Directed by
Andrew Levitas
Overview
Estranged from his family, Jonathan (Hedlund) discovers his father has decided to take himself off life support in forty-eight hours’ time. During this intensely condensed period, a lifetime of drama plays out. Robert (Jenkins) fights a zero sum game to reclaim all that his illness stole from his family. A debate rages on patients’ rights and what it truly means to be free. Jonathan reconciles with his father, reconnects with his mother (Archer), sister (Brown-Findlay), and his love (Adams) and reclaims his voice through two unlikely catalysts – a young, wise-beyond-her-years patient (Barden) and a no-nonsense nurse (Hudson). Through this intensely life affirming prism, an unexpected and powerful journey of love, laughter, and forgiveness unfolds.
Director and cast
Critics on Rotten Tomatoes
Top critics, in their words
A film like "Lullaby" should both enlighten and inspire debate. Instead, it feels simultaneously superficial and overbearing, albeit with a few moments that do indeed resonate.
The digital photography is crummy, and the characters who most need to convince ... feel created out of whole cloth. Polyester cloth, at that.
The kind of manipulative, cliche-infested hokum that alienates moviegoers by its insistence on hogging all the tears.
With the ever-expanding number of adults able to stay alive longer because of medical advancements, quality-of-life issues are top of mind for many folks. It's the way the filmmaker makes the point that is the problem.
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