Leo

Here, Joseph Fiennes plays Leo, a young man about to be released from prison ; in another world entirely, we meet Mary (Shue) who has a loving daughter and husband and is hard at work, making their home life the idyll she would want for a growing family. You follow the two plotlines gradually realising they’re interlinked – watching Leo attempting to go straight having served his time and in the other story, seeing how Leo comes into the world, about Mary’s affair with a painter working on her house. Slowly but surely writer Massy Tadjedin is going to reveal what drove Leo to commit murder to take him into prison in the first place.

Leo is quite an absorbing drama that gradually reveals what happened to pit the son against his mother. Its believable except for one strange moment when a mother having a baby (yes, Mary giving birth to Leo) who is not sure who is the baby’s father, takes no steps at all to find that out and from there the story rests on her assuming she knows who it was. It seems odd that she not make any attempt to eliminate doubt.

It’s also got a title that suggests it might be a children’s film rather than this adult family drama. Its called ‘Leopold Bloom’ in the US, which is only slightly better. Of the parts played, Fiennes is reasonable as the quiet ex-con Leo trying to make sense of the world, Hopper naturally plays an irascible customer leering at Unger playing a waitress, and Shue as the mother has the part that doesn’t quite convince. Norowzian coming from a commercials background, makes a fair stab at interweaving the two timezones successfully and there’s one great scene towards the end when Leo the older man meets Leo, as a young boy, but overall you feel Leo could have been a better film and that it might be difficult to see Leo causing a great roar of excitement at the Box Office.

Matt Arnoldi