‘Boundaries’ Tests Limits of Patience (FILM REVIEW)

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The most frustrating part of Boundaries is how good it could’ve been. Vera Farmiga and Christopher Plummer each play roles that could’ve been meaty and delicious, and very nearly were. That’s difficult to say, considering how delightful they each are in the film, but any positive things I can say about Boundaries seems an accident of their charms, rather than an innate quality of the film itself.

Writer/director Shana Feste (Endless Love) has a problem not of character but of plot. Both of her mains, the daughter/father duo of Laura and Jack Jaconi (Farmiga and Plummer, respectively) are interesting characters, each with enough pathos to fill a movie of their own. Together, they’re given an opportunity to explore the path of overcoming personal trauma. None of that happens, however. Not in any meaningful way. Instead, Boundaries spins its wheels in a vain attempt to gain traction as a sort of madcap romp.

It doesn’t do that particularly well either, choosing instead to waste a perfectly good setup involving perfectly good characters in a hodge podge of ill-conceived scenes that, while superficially entertaining, never really add up to anything worthwhile.

Laura Jaconi is a woman trying to piece her life together. A single mother, she works a dead-end job for a former friend and just tries to do right by her outcast son, Henry (Lewis MacDougall). Despite recently placing a contact boundary on her aging father, whose perpetual absence in her youth haunts her into adulthood, she’s forced into reconciliation when he is kicked out of his retirement home for selling weed. Now, despite knowing better, she must take him on a cross country drive to California so that he can live with her sister (Kristen Schaal).

While both Farmiga and Plummer are charming in their roles, their charm seems to work in spite of the script, rather than because of it. Too often, Feste appears to not know what to do with her characters or setup beyond the surface. Like a bad road trip, the script detours and meanders with vague promises of getting somewhere, without ever living up to its promises.

Both Laura and Jack feel like little more than cut outs, even with Farmiga and Plummer playing the absolute hell out of their roles. Their depth is alluded to, but rarely explored, leaving them to stagnate horribly as the movie moves from one pointless scene to the next. (Witness: a horrifically awkward song and dance routine performed by Farmiga and Schaal that takes neither the characters nor their journeys to any new ground; witness: wasted uses of Christopher Lloyd and Peter Fonda in cookie cutter cameos.)

The longer Boundaries goes on, the more frustrating its wasted potential becomes. Too often it shines a dim light on the movie that it could have been, almost teasing the audience with the decisions it chooses to make instead. What could have been a movie of real depth and character becomes, instead, a regrettably forgettable series of missteps and false starts that fills its hollowness with saccharine overtures.

Boundaries is now playing in select theaters.

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