Simple road movie with a good mix of drama and humor
Author: nancysep from Netherlands
21 June 2012
Thoroughly enjoyed this road movie that made me forget I watched it with my friends. There is a good mix between drama and humor. The dutch actresses (sisters Van Houten) act very natural and the American (Holly Hunter) actress acts intriguing. You follow the journey of the Dutch sisters with their long lost Americain mother. Although a difficult process the journey leads to some insight in their lives. It clarifies the way they live their life. By driving their mother round they also add value to her miserable life. The music adds to the atmosphere of the movie that ends with a nice twist in the tale. The story is simple and not flawless, but overall I give it a 8 because of the good mix of drama, humor and atmosphere.
3 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
A road movie about finding a mother
Author: jennifer-vrielinck from Belgium
11 February 2014
This is a magnificent movie. It contains feel-good, ups and downs, laughter and tears, violence and kindness, love and lust. A lot of contradictions. The movie is a mirror of real life, like road movies should be. All actors are casted great. The scenery is philosophical and well chosen for the story. Especially the end is magical. Not in a fairy-tale way but in a way people should think about what fairy-tales are. The singing is beautiful, the acting is true, the girls are lovely, the mother too. I enjoyed every minute, every frame. The story takes you along and stays with you for a very long time. It's an intense experience. Without spoiling it for future watchers: this is what life is all about. A philosophical approach of family and of love... The fabulous end is the answer to all questions.
5 out of 7 people found the following review useful:
It was a great movie... Until the ending.
Author: Liv Poulsen from Denmark
2 April 2013
The movie is about two dutch sisters who travel to America to meet their mother who has been gone for their whole lives. She is in the hospital with a fractured leg, and she needs to be transferred to a centre for rehabilitation. But the mother is a bit strange. She doesn't seem very happy to see her children. They travel together many kilometers in the mothers minibus, they get a lot of new experiences and their lives change forever. It is a great movie, and the story with the two sisters seeing their mother again is great. It is funny and a specially the ending is a bit overwhelming. The ending comes very unexpected, and one could think that the movie could have been much better and more worth watching if the ending had been different.
1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
Worth watching, but odd
Author: birck from Philly
12 May 2014
I enjoyed this film, whether because of or in spite of some of its peculiarities, I know not. Two young adult dutch sisters, with lives in Holland as problematic as anybody's, get word that their absentee American mother has gone into a hospital in New Mexico, dare each other to take on the job, and wind up still together, meeting her for the first time at a rehab center in the States. The story is of how they all get to know each other and how the sisters are able to make some changes of their own, thanks to the journey. Oddly, many sexes are represented here, but decent non-macho, non-dickhead males are thin on the ground. To be fair, that doesn't seem to be a poke at Americans, since the sisters have the same issues to deal with back in Amsterdam-and are forced to deal with them via Skype during the road trip; just odd. Another oddness is that the filmmakers set and shot the story in a New Mexico that could have been the location for "the Road". It's a flat, barren wasteland that looks more like the deserts of West Texas or Oklahoma than like anybody's Land of Enchantment. Their trip takes them through one cruddy jerkwater roadhouse after another. That serves to point out that, yes, some Europeans do like American Country-Western music. But what happened to the Rocky Mountains, Santa Fe and Albequerque? New Mexico can be spectacular, but the director seems to have chosen what she found under a rock instead. Odd. If for no other reason, this film is worth watching for the "Dykes on Bikes" sequence. I will say no more.
1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
seems like a typical road-movie at first but goes deeper
Author: James Moriarty from Germany
4 August 2013
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
(The spoiler within this review is not too bad. I think you can read this review instead of the wikipedia-summary before watching the movie without getting disappointed. Perhaps it even increases your "adventure".)
On the surface this move seems to deal with two sisters having a great adventure on the road and leaving their old lives behind. Already within the first minutes you can see typical patterns; both sisters struggle with their individual lives. The older one is egocentric and career focused, the younger one seems to have deep problems in her current relationship. As soon as they viewer gets to know that both of them are going to have a road trip, the spectator can imagine that this will change both lives and characters. This pattern has always been present in movies, from present to past. (Just as in Despicable Me, The Intouchables, Cruel Intentions,… to list a few examples.)
In my point of view, the movies subject is on a different level. Beyond the obvious plot, it deals with the family-ideal as it exists and especially with the relations between its members. Whilst the viewer gets comfortable with the situation, the ending questions which connections and what behavior a family member has to fulfill. And I'm pretty sure that the writers even had some thoughts which didn't come to my mind yet. Furthermore, I think that the spectator has to be concerned with this question before watching the movie. Otherwise it's going to be clumsy and sometimes boring.
Besides, the music and the landscape pictures are beautiful. (Concerning the booklet and the movie's title… well, too bad they won't reach the expected audience.)
0 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
Good Performances, Contrived Plot
Author: markyd-329-720968 from Albuquerque, NM
18 June 2013
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
There are excellent performances by the 3 actresses here. Holly Hunter gives a mysterious and intense performance as the fabled and unknown mother, since the daughters grew up in the Netherlands and mom, a surrogate mother, lives in New Mexico. (These are not spoilers since this part of the plot is laid out within the first few minutes of the movie, and reported elsewhere.) There are some nice insights into the lives of twin sisters growing up without a mother, since their parents are 2 men. There is no political or moral statement about this, just a natural occurrence without a woman in their lives. The intriguing thing is how both sisters reacted quite differently. As the plot moves along, these differences are fleshed out. They must also confront their childhood fantasies about "Mother" when they come into contact with the wonderfully strange Hunter character. The cinematography is delicious, given the New Mexico locations.
Though this is an unconventional reunion story, Adoptees, Birth Mothers and others who wound up in families by non-conventional means will share in the sense of loss these sisters have experienced as well as the inner journey they both must navigate. However, the plot itself crashes along in a nonsensical way at times, and as things build towards a perceived happy ending, the contrived action overwhelms! In such a short period of time, insights and redemption and connection and breakthroughs and awakenings and, etc ..., they come so fast and furious that the "heart string pulling machine" was on overdrive as the plot becomes gratuitously formulaic.However, during this time when I wanted to walk out of the movie, others were crying and cheering, so you may see it differently.Other plot devices used in this movie will have to go uncritiqued because of spoiler issues.
