Spoilers ahead … If it’s not already enough of a spoiler to tell you that Fireflies in the Garden is a family drama that looks good and works hard but ends up being extremely dreary.
It’s a serious art-movie kind of film, meaning serious as in lacking even a smidgen of humour, let alone self-conscious irony (with the possible exception of something in Emily Watson’s eyes). It has lots of lovely cinematography and not just when cinematographer Danny Moder’s wife Julia Roberts is on screen. She’s not on screen that much, anyway. Here are estimable actors doing their best but, oh dear, it’s all so very unenjoyable.
Ryan Reynolds plays Michael Taylor, a writer going back to his family home for a celebration. This is a step up for Reynolds, whose most notable role so far was as a vampire-killer in Blade III. In Fireflies in the Garden, he certainly looks the part of the writer — he has a beard and spectacles. That’s, like, a cross between Ernest Hemingway and Arthur Miller!
We also know that if he’s heading back home for a celebration then something is likely to go horribly wrong, which of course it does. Past and present are given in parallel streams so we’re clear why this was going to be difficult for him anyway. Once you’ve worked out who’s who in past versus present, this is reasonably interesting, but there’s too much of it. A lot happens, without adding up to anything satisfying. A plethora of pregnant pauses and meaningful looks is not enough.
Willem Dafoe is horribly effective as Michael’s tyrannical father, but there’s no need to hammer his nastiness home in scene after scene. Watson delivers her usual fine performance and Roberts is believable as everyone’s ideal mom. Carrie-Ann Moss is just Carrie-Ann Moss, being humped by Reynolds instead of Keanu Reeves for a change.
For about half an hour, Fireflies in the Garden almost managed to convince me it was a good film, even if it wasn’t any fun. It looks like a good film, it may even taste like a good film. But it smells like a terribly old sock left under your bed when you were a teenager and recovered only years later when you moved house.
It has the air of semi-autobiography, which would at least explain why writer-director Dennis Lee felt compelled to tell this tale. Perhaps he needed to purge the memory of a particularly awful dad. If that’s the case, though, it seems odd to have your writer-protagonist decide not to publish his tell-all family memoir, obviously called Fireflies in the Garden, on compassionate grounds, and to make that seem like a moral step forward — while you go on to make a revealing family drama called Fireflies in the Garden.
Likewise, if you are going to use the title of a Robert Frost poem as your movie’s title, and if you are going to include an episode in which that very poem causes trauma to your protagonist (already a considerable contrivance), do you really need to devise a scene in which you actually provide fireflies in the garden? How literal can you get? Like Frost’s fireflies, this film is trying hard but “can’t sustain the part”.