Virginia (2010)

I listened to a long form interview with writer/director Dustin Lance Black (Milk, Big Love) last year where he talked about his childhood and now I know where most of this movie comes from. It's a mess of too many ideas, and as a result feels crowded and under developed. Jennifer Connelly plays Virginia, a single mother living in a Virginia beach town with her teenage son Emmett (Harrison Gilbertson). Virginia has been having an ongoing affair for the last 16 years with the local sheriff (Ed Harris) who is now running for the state legislator. Emmett has a crush on the sheriffs daughter Jessie (Emma Roberts) who might be his half sister. Virginia fakes a pregnancy, but she really has cancer, and she tries to rob the local bank, and the owner of the boardwalk amusement park is a secret transvestite and he makes a deal with the sheriff to attract a presidential candidate to town for labor day and Paul Walter Hauser is a professional babysitter. It's well cast, and there's the makings of a soapy TV series here but its all just too much for this movie and the result is very bad, no wonder it was barely distributed theatrically. *