It's clear that independent cinema has finally become virtually indistinguishable from mainstream cinema when a movie like A Home at the End of the World opens. Starring big-name actors (one with several Oscar nominations under her belt), based on a book by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, directed by a respected stage veteran, and distributed by a division of a major studio, the only real difference between Home and any major studio release is the number of theaters it's opening in.
While it's good that a serious, weighty film like this has studio backing and a high profile, it's also indicative of how safe and ultimately predictable much of indie film has become in the last decade or so. Home isn't a bad movie by any means; it's just a familiar one, taking on issues that might have been controversial when its source material, a novel by The Hours author Michael Cunningham, was published in 1990, but now seems pedestrian and almost quaint after so many years of the same sort of thing being presented in indie films.
There's youthful sexual experimentation, as the film starts out with best friends Bobby (Erik Smith), a spacy hippie type, and Jonathan (Harris Allan), a neurotic nerd, fooling around with each other during high school sleepovers in the 1970s. They get high, listen to the Stones and bond with Jonathan's mom (Sissy Spacek). When Bobby's father dies, following the earlier deaths of his brother and mother, he moves in with Jonathan's family.
Cut to 10 years later, and a grown-up Bobby (Colin Farrell) is still living with his surrogate parents in Cleveland, while Jonathan (Dallas Roberts) is out in New York City, rooming with a bohemian clothing designer named Clare (Robin Wright Penn) and fully out of the closet. When Jonathan's parents retire and move to Arizona, Bobby comes to live with his old pal. He and Clare fall in love and eventually have a child, and the quartet form an unlikely family.
Although Home features its share of tragedies, and plenty of moments that tug at your heart in familiar ways, it's not nearly as morbid or downbeat as The Hours. Cunningham himself wrote the screenplay, and like its title, the film has an optimistic, inclusive tone, even as its characters deal with plenty of hardship. At the same time, many of the emotional moments resonant less since we've seen them so often before, especially in films about "alternative" families and sexuality. While Roberts does a fine job of playing the noble sufferer, one of the two standard gay male tropes in cinema (the other is the flaming queen), Farrell struggles more with naïve, simple Bobby, who loves everyone and everything so much that he couldn't possibly define his sexuality in a traditional way.
But the film belongs to the women. Wright Penn is marvelous as the sharp-tongued Clare, a woman caught in the middle of a friendship she can never truly equal, and Spacek shines in her few scenes as the one stereotype-breaking character, a suburban mother who fully embraces the non-mainstream choices of her children. Director Michael Mayer pushes the right buttons for a film of this type, and it might have felt fresh and innovative a decade ago, but now it feels more like a well-intentioned, well-acted retread.