Lonesome Jim

In Lonesome Jim, 27-year-old Jim (Casey Affleck) returns, reluctantly and filled with self-pity, to his parental home in a small town in rural Indiana. He is there to ‘find himself’, but really he’s just broke. Jim has a sweet but overpowering mother, a distant father and a pretty depressed elder brother, Tim. After Tim has a car smash, Jim feels obliged to take on his brother’s tasks: coaching a children’s basketball team and working in his parents’ factory, where his scary cousin Evil is a dominant presence. But Jim’s heart skips a beat when he meets Anika (Liv Tyler), an attractive younger nurse who lives on her own with her little son. The productive Steve Buscemi – who has played more than eighty film roles in nineteen years and is now very active directing – has made a film with a strikingly good script (by James C. Strouse), filled with dry humour in the dialogues, and which excellently express the thoughts and feelings of the characters. Lonesome Jim looks authentic thanks to the atmospheric digital photography of the boring grey town, the excellent actors (including Mary Kay Place and Seymour Kassel as the parents) and the convincing use of location (Buscemi filmed in his home town, and the factory really does belong to his parents). What’s more, this story with ‘a laugh and a tear’ even has a credible plot. (EH)

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