FilmSnobReviews

Title: The Kindness of Strangers
MPAA Rating: Not Rated
Director: Lone Scherfig
Starring: Zoe Kazan, Andrea Riseborough, Caleb Landry Jones
Runtime: 1 hr 52 mins

What It Is: Clara (Kazan) has an abusive husband who also happens to be a cop. Alice (Riseborough) is a nurse in an emergency room. In her spare time, she runs a support group, a group that Marc (Tahar Rahim) is a member of. Alongside the lawyer that got him released John Peter (Jay Baruchel), they’re working on some personal demons. As all of their stories collide will they be able to help Clara escape with her two sons that are now homeless?

What We Think: Oh boy! This is by no means a good film at all. Zoe Kazan deserves better then what’s she’s given here. Andrea Riseborough obviously does. Her (Riseborough) year has been hit (Possessor) or miss. This is a definite miss. It’s structure a victim of its script which has much too much going on in it. It’s harder and harder to care about Clara as a three-dimensional character as it progresses because we never got a sense of her during her crisis and now all we get is the resolution, possibly, of that issue. Everything is too much of a jumbled mess to make any sense out of any of it. Bill Nighy is in this…why? So he can do a Russian accent he turns off and on? Nonsense. Lone Scherfig is so damned talented as a director. Her previous efforts Their Finest and One Day are both underrated gems and An Education is an Oscar-nominated masterwork. Here she just didn’t have it.

Our Grade: C-, If you want to see what wasted talent looks like on-screen this is a film that solidifies it. Lone Scherfig is a great director working with blase material and Kazan, Nighy and Riseborough are all amazing talents purgatorially stuck in this less than stellar feature. Where’s Caleb Landry Jones gone? Dudes in stuff like Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and Heaven Knows What and now he’s showing up in this drivel. I’d say see it is he premise interests you if not it’s a skip.