Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You

The thing I really loved the most about this movie was the title, which is actually a wonderful sentiment that I never really wanted to believe in, but now I am in my dotage I’ll admit has more than a smidgen of truth to it.

James is the teenager who is at the receiving end of this advice from his grandmother who herself leads such an idyllic picture-book country cottage life herself it doesn’t seem that it’s coming from her own experience.  Except that she is substituting for the role of mother in the boy’s life as his own (her daughter) is away with the fairies too often to fulfill the role herself.

Ma is Marjorie, who’s just arrived back to her chic Manhattan townhouse having walked out on her third husband whilst still on their honeymoon.  She just wants to get back to her reality, which is owning an avant-garde Chelsea Art Gallery where no-one seems to want to come and part with the their hard earned cash to buy any of the ridiculous pieces on sale. The latest exhibit is talking garbage bins!  James’s vain father, still dating girls young enough to be his daughter, is about to have plastic surgery and he thinks his son is gay, just because James prefers salad to steak. And to complete the family, James’s 23 yr. old sister is dating her much older (and married) college professor.

Margery struggles to relate to James especially as he is now insisting he doesn’t want to go to College so she sends him to a Life Coach/Psychotherapist who declares him normal.  But by that point we already knew that. And in fact ‘the crazies’ were all the others around him. Except maybe for Granny.

My main beef with this potentially sweet Coming Of Age  movie was that all of the characters, except maybe James and Granny, were like caricatures.  Too exaggerated and too unreal.  It was hard to escape the feeling that the story/movie was lacking in substance to make it complete, and a very weak ending didn’t help that.

On paper it had a lot going for it with a cast headed by two Oscar winners Marcia Gay Harden & Ellen Burstyn plus Peter Gallagher and Deborah Ann Woll (True Blood) but the only one who really shone was young Toby Regbo in his movie debut as James.  (The less we say about Lucy Liu as an emotionless Life Coach, the better!)

So a pleasant enough movie with some funny moments with a likable kid but I really wouldn’t rush to see it.  Any pain you may actually derive from the experience will not in fact be any use to you at all.