A Home at the End of the World (2004) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

One of the very few smart things I've ever written about movies can be found in my review of Tigerland, written about four years ago, before anyone was aware of Colin Farrell.

I was especially astounded by the performance of Colin Farrell as Bozz. He's an Irish stage actor, and he transforms himself into the perfect independent-minded Texas boy. This fella may have a hell of a future.

Farrell's subsequent performances have not been universally brilliant, but he has unquestionably become a star of international repute, based on his flamboyant private life as much as on his acting chops. He has the perfect combination of attributes for celebrity - talent, looks, recklessness, and an unquenchable sex drive.

In this film, he also proves that he is not just a star, but also one hell of an actor. In the past, many of his roles have called for extensions of his larger-than-life public persona - cheeky, dominant, and wild. The character he plays in this film could not be farther from that. It is a blissful, submissive, shy, passive, tame, sexually ambiguous hippie who just wants everyone around him to be mellow. I guess any good actor could play a part so far from type, but what distinguishes Colin as more than good, as a great actor, is that he shows no signs that he is acting. If you did not already know what Colin Farrell is like, you would assume that this character is just what Colin is like. He has no trouble at all with the American accent - you'd never suspect that he isn't an American. His overall performance is unaffected, natural, and completely free from artifice. It is also warm, generous, and tremendously likeable. Suddenly, I understand completely why Colin is so successful with women.

... speaking of which ...

This film is already semi-famous for all the wrong reasons. As a film, it is virtually unknown, despite some decent reviews and a respectable festival run. It never reached more than 65 theaters, and grossed only about a million dollars in the entire United States - and even that modest achievement took 14 weeks of arthouse distribution. As a cultural phenomenon, however, it is much discussed.

Oh, you can't remember hearing of this film by name. Neither could I. But you've heard of it all right. This is the film where the screening of Colin Farrell's reputedly Brobdingnagian tallywacker caused such a stir that the director ended up cutting it out of the film. The San Francisco Gate described the controversy as follows:

According to a British newspaper the Sun, nude scenes spotlighting actor Colin Farrell's full-frontal manhood have been cut from his new film, "A Home at the End of the World." Sounds painful, eh? The paper quoted an undisclosed publicist -- sorry, an undisclosed source -- as claiming the dimensions of the offending member disrupted a test screening. "The women were overexcited," said the source, "and the men looked really uncomfortable."

Colin was said to be very upset that the scene was snipped, and was insisting that the scene be restored to the DVD. I have just watched the DVD, and I saw no sign of any gigantic penises,  so I guess the deleted scene remains deleted. There are no deleted scenes included in the DVD extras. The disc does have a featurette, but I fast-forwarded through that and didn't see any sign of an elephantine manroot. I don't think I could have missed it, since it is apparently the size of Costa Rica.

Cutting Farrell's mighty member seems kind of hypocritical to me, in light of the fact that an actress is shown naked in a completely unnecessary scene (a flashback to Colin's childhood, and memories of his beloved older brother), and that the nudity is quite explicit. Oh, well, I guess the size of Colin's prodigious flesh-rocket will have to remain a whispered and undocumented secret.

Getting back to the subject of the movie for a minute, it is a pretty good one. "Why?", you ask. I suppose there are many reasons why a film can be called "good", and in this case I felt that way because it made me totally uncomfortable. "Huh?", you respond. You see, I felt like I was watching people's home movies. I got the illusion that many of the moments in their lives were really happening, and were so personal and intimate that I had no business watching. Colin Farrell was the best of the cast at conveying that intimacy, but Sissy Spacek almost matched him beat for beat. To my way of thinking, that kind of honesty is very effective and convincing filmmaking.

What's it about? Not much of anything. The plot is meandering. It's character-driven personal history, I guess. Other people might call it a soap opera which encompasses decades of life. It's not for the homophobic. Its author, Michael Cunningham, is widely celebrated in the world of gay and lesbian authors, and he won a Pulitzer Prize for his other major novel, The Hours. Queer Studies describes the source novel for A Home at the End of the World as follows:

It traces the friendship of the two friends from boyhood to adulthood. They become close. The one boy is definitely gay, and the other (Farrell) just wants to please people and connect with them, so he becomes his friend's lover. He also becomes kind of a fantasy lover for the friend's mom (Spacek), and by the time the kids grow up, he takes on a female lover when the two young men get embroiled in a strange triangular love with an eccentric aging hippie chick (Robin Wright). The Colin Farrell character is simply having sex or making connections with everyone of both sexes, although he never actually initiates sex, and is perfectly content going without sex during those periods when he's separated from his closest acquaintances. Farrell's first encounter with Wright and the first encounter between the two boys are both painfully intimate scenes. Colin's scenes with Spacek, on the other hand, are not painful to watch, and in fact they portray a unique and very sweet May-December relationship of some kind, but those scenes still create an illusion that we are eavesdropping when we should not be.