Review: Accidents Happen (2009)

Released April 22, 2010

The struggling family of Accidents Happen

Geena Davis’s career imploded after Cutthroat Island, the 1995 pirate movie that holds the dubious honour of being the biggest ever box-office flop. After an intermission involving Olympic archery and matters presidential (TV’s Commander in Chief), she returns to the big screen in this numbing British-Australian co-production about a family torn apart by unfortunate happenstance.

In tone and theme, it’s a less charming version of Pushing Daisies, the wonderful series that combined wacky Tim Burton-esque whimsy with morbid dark humour. There’s some of that here: “Some people wouldn’t know their ass from an air-conditioner,” our know-it-all narrator informs us as a man goes up in flames on a sunny morning in suburban Connecticut. Beautifully shot in poetic slow-motion, it’s the best scene in the film. This event is observed by the young Billy Conway (Harrison Gilbertson), the son of Davis’s Gloria, a boy struggling to find his place within his fractured family after a car accident kills his sister and places one brother into a coma.

He’s too bland a protagonist for us to really invest in his coping strategies – dabbling in girls, drugs and the odd nude streak through the local supermarket. Davis is however fine as the distraught mother, who spends most of the time on the verge of crying and muttering overly-scripted, inane wisecracks like “I’m so hungry I could eat a crowbar and shit a jungle jim.”

First-time feature director Andrew Lancaster shows a flair for painterly images but is saddled by a mess of a script by Brian Carbee that never settles on a consistent tone. Things turn all serious at the end when the story focuses on the real psychological cost of the family’s loss, and even though the ethereal indie-rock soundtrack encourages us otherwise, it’s hard to care when the catharsis isn’t earned.