Some Voices
(2000)
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A heartwarming and honest film about a couple trying to enjoy daily life while struggling with mental illness, SOME VOICES comes from director Simon Cellan Jones. In the movie, a man who has recently been released from a mental hospital gets a job working at a cafe operated by his brother. He falls in love with another employee--who is also mentally ill--and the two decide to run away and get married. However, between hearing voices, forgetting to take their medication, and myriad other difficulties, the lovebirds find themselves on a winding path full of very real obstacles. |
Having served his apprenticeship on the 1996 TV series Our Friends in the North, Simon Cellan Jones makes his feature debut with this low-key study of psychiatric instability and its ramifications. The director occasionally allows Joe Penhall's adaptation of his own play to become stagey and soap-operatic, and there's a lack of impact in the conventional relationships his schizophrenic central character (Daniel Craig) has with his café-owning brother, David Morrissey, and sassy Scot Kelly Macdonald. Yet Cellan Jones still manages to give an immediacy to the action by using flash-editing techniques to convey Craig's distorted world. It's an intense, affecting and well-acted film, but despite some quirky “real world” backdrops it's always a drama and never life.
Halliwell's Film Guide
Unambitious small-scale drama concentrating on a fractured relationship between the two brothers; despite the creditable performances, it would seem best suited for the TV movie 'disease of the week' spot.