Personal Response
What a movie. I believe the overall theme is how parenting affects our lives forever, how other people’s behavior (specifically our parents’) can shape the rest of our lives, often for the worse. Do we ever really overcome childhood? Why are we so deeply affected by our parents’ actions? Is forgiveness truly achievable? The movie strongly suggests forgiveness at the end, but choosing when to forgive is the hard part, and actually forgiving is even harder.
Many characters stood out to me, with Claudia being one of them. She looks so messed up, so unstable, and then everything makes sense once we learn what she went through. It’s incredibly hard to recover from that kind of trauma, and it explains her daddy issues and why she sleeps around. There’s even a darkly funny coincidence in how the nice guy who appears in her life shares the same first name as her father.
Frank TJ was also super interesting to me. I’ve seen that pattern in real life, when people go through traumatic events, sometimes they create an entire lie about who they are and then start believing it themselves. You can’t pull them out of that delusion. He becomes this big jerk with a fake life and still manages to achieve success; well, monetary and fame-related success, but he’s clearly still deeply unhappy. I wonder if he ever forgave his father after he passed away.
Another character I found interesting was Donnie Smith, played by William H. Macy. This is now the second movie we’ve watched where he plays a total loser, and I can’t tell if it’s because of his physical characteristics or because he’s just incredibly good at playing that kind of character, or maybe it’s pure coincidence. But I found it fascinating. In Fargo he was the first loser, and here he’s the second one: clumsy, insecure, barely functioning as an adult. He just plays the role so convincingly.