A Month of Sundays * 1/2

Is this a still of the Lead actor or audience?

You’ll probably hear reports of how A Month of Sundays is poignant, gentle, understated blah blah. And it probably is from time to time, but mostly you are awash in a series of uneventful and boring scenes - and I'm a man who can really appreciate a slow gentle film.

I don’t know, but I get the impression someone really wanted to make a film or write a script and then just started patching it together. What a shame he didn’t start with a good idea or plot.

I don't know where the director got the weird idea to run exhausted, near lifeless, scenes way past their effective time, but that’s what keeps happening over and over. You could almost shout at the screen: “We’re done with this scene. You’ve obviously got nothing more to say. Come on, let's move on!”.  
It’s like listening to a dithering, ill prepared, stammering speech delivered by someone who thinks his style of presentation will overcome any shortcomings in content; but unfortunately his “style” only exacerbates the situation.

The main character is a depressed Real Estate Agent in the city of Adelaide.Other characters  don’t seem to have much reason for being other than giving him someone to interact with.  He'd be one of the most inactive lead characters I have ever seen. Things are revealed about the other characters that are supposed to fill us with surprise and awe or sentimentality, but it's really hard to give a shit.

There doesn’t seem to be any plot.  You just watch an uninteresting man go through a series of events punctuated by occasionally contrived unlikely dramatic situations.

Other than a few nights at the Melbourne Theatre Company  I don’t think I’ve checked my watch so frequently in eager anticipation of the ending.

Worse than its indolence is its air of condescending assumption that the creators know how to make good drama and we the audience can be played.  It’s like the director thinks he’s a magician doing an act for a kindergarten group. We will be easily fooled.  Perhaps we would if he knew what he was was doing.  You can almost hear him issuing instructions:….”Hold and hold and hold and hold and hold and hold and………..cut!”  

The most interesting part of this film are the non-speakers (symbolic beings,parading through the background to subliminally tell us something I suppose) and even they’re a bit dull.

And do we really need another film, book, play, record, restaurant or whatever with the thoroughly overused name "A Month of Sundays"? You'd think a little more imagination might have been used. Or in this case, maybe you wouldn't.