Fireflies in the Garden

by Matthew Rodgers

The dysfunctional family featured in Fireflies in the Garden live in a house sandwiched between Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm, and little seen Steve Carrell drab dramedy, Dan in Real Life. It’s one of those moralistic ensemble pieces that smacks of melancholy and an acoustic guitar drenched soundtrack. Sometimes they work as an honest portrayal of familial life, more often than not they can become over-wrought and stagy but with the odd stand-out performance. All of the above is present in Dennis Lee’s starry debut.

Michael Taylor (Ryan Reynolds – Wolverine) is on his way to a family celebration, one that offers a respite from his ailing marriage and unsatisfying career as a romantic novelist, and also gives him the chance to reunite with his idolised mother (Julia Roberts). When tragedy strikes, the family are forced to gather for a wholly unexpected reason, bringing together father (Willem Dafoe) and son, and reigniting simmering memories of an abusive adolescence that permeate the conflict at the centre of this troubled tale.

Fireflies in the Garden is a difficult recommendation. It features some very good actors flexing their acting chops; Reynolds can do serious now, fact. Roberts is fleeting, but requisitely grandiose in making Lisa a tower of strength for her put upon son. Watson and Moss are perhaps the most hard-done by because of the patriarchal struggle between father and son that hogs the screen time, but they are still decent enough. And it’s that “father” that deserves the plaudits, Dafoe is over-bearing and intimidating in flashbacks and frail but unforgiving in the contemporary timeline, his is a superbly written character of bottled rage, brought to life with aplomb. But for all those performances this never adds up to the sum of its parts.

The tone is all over the place, one minute a translucent dream like nostalgia trip, the next minute a morose, blandly shot drama with some very unsubtle metaphors; character is moody, so here comes the rain to emphasise the sadness and cleansing of souls. Sigh. And don’t even mention the hideously judged “comedy sex-scene” that completely de-rails any empathy we could have had for our protagonist.

Unravelling with uninspired predictability, this has the feel of a stage play, with its limited scope and sometimes hackneyed dialogue it does very little to make it stand out from the already overcrowded genre of the “fractured family”.