it left me feeling...
pensive.
i love raymond carver's short stories, and this film is loosely based on his "so much water so close to home". i haven't read it, but the director's attention to conveying mood when two people encounter each other, and the shifts in atmosphere, whether gradual or abrupt, occurring in those encounters, honours carver's incredible capacity for observation in his economic prose. observation of ordinary people in ordinary days, experiencing emotions which feel anything but ordinary. feelings of rage, boredom, anger, grief, love and guilt. observation which charges ordinary actions with righteous or wretched significance. 
i read a review that said 'laura linney is once again cast as a movie's moral centre'. but i disagree. it is hard to determine where, or with whom, the moral centre of this film might lie. and it is this irresolvability which makes it so persuasive.
