Perfectly good, decent, sweet film seemed to get unfairly critically hammered. To us, Penn is a great actor and this is one of his best performances (he was Oscar-nominated). Dakota Fanning, with those big baby blues, is perfect. And Michelle Pfeiffer also makes the eyes water in scene in which she confesses how less than perfect she is - oddly, though, her own eyes don't water.
With Dianne Weist, Richard Schiff again, Loretta Devine, Laura Dern. Brad Silverman and Joseph Rosenberg actually had mental difficulties, Stanley de Santis (the paranoid one) and Doug Hutchison (movie fan) are just good actors.
Suffers from the annoying device of having the camera constantly zoom in and out a bit, which is very distracting, and some overly blue shooting (I think Elliot Davis is trying to colour code scenes to the emotion but doesn't pull it off). Benefits though from a soundtrack comprising (not all familiar) Beatles covers and good incidental music from John Powell (who now seems to specialise in animated films). Nimbly edited by Richard Chew (Star Wars, Cuckoo's Nest, The Conversation, The New World).
We can only assume that the seven year old Dakota in her film debut got on famously with Sean Penn.
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