Rating: 
Summary: THE MOST MATURE FANTASY OF CATHARSIS THRU PAINED CHILDHOOD
Review: "THE HANGING GARDEN" IS WHAT IS COMMONLY REFERRED TO AS A SLEEPER, AT LEAST IT WAS HERE IN THE U.S. OUR FINELY HONED, SLICKED DOWN 'LAMBOURGHINI' FILM INDUSTRY HERE IN HOLLYWOOD HAS PACKAGED EVERY ASPECT OF THE ART FORM UNTIL ONLY THE MOST WASHED-OUT, GREASY JUNK FOOD MOVIES ARE LEFT TO APPEAL TO LOWEST COMMON DENOMITOR, DEMOGRAPHICALLY ACCEPTABLE MASS AUDIENCES. A FILM AS PAINFULLY HONEST, INSIGHTFUL, AND SIMPLE AS "THE HANGING GARDEN" NEVER HAD A CHANCE HERE!INSTEAD, WHAT WE FIND WITH THIS CANADIAN RUNNER-UP FOR THEIR OWN VERSION OF BEST PICTURE OSCAR ("THE SWEET HEREAFTER" WON) IS AN INCREDIBLY MATURE, HONEST REDISCOVERY OF ONE MAN'S OWN FANTASIES MIXING WITH THE REALITIES OF A COMPLETELY DISFUNCTIONAL FAMILY UPBRINGING OUTSIDE THE "BIG CITY" OF HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA. WHILE THE PREMISE MAY BE SIMPLE, A GAY MAN COMING HOME FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 10 YEARS FOR HIS SISTER'S WEDDING, THE EXECUTION IS A WORK OF ART UNTO ITSELF. NOT A PART IN THE PIECE IS THROWAWAY, NOT A SHOT EXTRANEOUS. EVERYTHING YOU SEE AND HEAR IS THERE FOR A REASON, OR AS YOU'LL FIND OUT, FOR MANY REASONS THAT ONLY SITTING QUIETLY AND ATTENTIVELY UNTIL THE VERY LAST CREDIT ROLLS WILL YOU FULLY COMPREHEND. IT'S TRULY A SHAME THAT THIS REVIEW COMES FROM HAVING SEEN THIS FILM TWICE LAST SUMMER IN A THEATRE FOCUSED ON SHOWCASING INDEPENDENT FILM AND NOT FROM HAVING SEEN IT ON VIDEOTAPE IN MY OWN HOME. FROM SOME SOPHOMORIC, REASONLESS CONCLUSION, THE PRODUCERS OR DISTRIBUTORS OF "THE HANGING GARDEN" HAVE REFRAINED FROM RELEASING THIS FILM TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC ON VIDEO AND DVD, THE TWO MEDIA WHERE THIS FILM WILL SHINE THE BRIGHTEST, AND WHERE IT IS NEEDED MOST. THIS IS, IN ALL CANDOR, ONE OF THE HANDFUL OF FILMS FROM THE LAST FIVE YEARS OF FILM WHICH MIGHT ACTUALLY HAVE AN AFFECT ON SOMEONE'S PERSPECTIVE; DARE I SAY A LIFE-CHANGING IMPACT, EVEN! IT'S A STORY FROM WHICH YOU LEAVE ALTERED, SEEING THE WORLD AROUND YOU WITH NEW EYES, AND IT NEEDS TO BE SEEN BY MORE PEOPLE; IN THIS COUNTRY, AND AROUND THE WORLD. MAYBE THERE'S A WAY WE CAN FIND TO TIP THEIR HANDS, INSISTING THEY GIVE US THIS AND OTHER FILMS WITH SIMILAR PASSION AND PROFESSIONALISM THAT CAN TRULY BE SEEN AS ART WHICH TRANSCENDS ITS MEDIUM.
Rating:
Summary: THE MOST MATURE FANTASY OF CATHARSIS THRU PAINED CHILDHOOD
Review: "THE HANGING GARDEN" IS WHAT IS COMMONLY REFERRED TO AS A SLEEPER, AT LEAST IT WAS HERE IN THE U.S. OUR FINELY HONED, SLICKED DOWN 'LAMBOURGHINI' FILM INDUSTRY HERE IN HOLLYWOOD HAS PACKAGED EVERY ASPECT OF THE ART FORM UNTIL ONLY THE MOST WASHED-OUT, GREASY JUNK FOOD MOVIES ARE LEFT TO APPEAL TO LOWEST COMMON DENOMITOR, DEMOGRAPHICALLY ACCEPTABLE MASS AUDIENCES. A FILM AS PAINFULLY HONEST, INSIGHTFUL, AND SIMPLE AS "THE HANGING GARDEN" NEVER HAD A CHANCE HERE! INSTEAD, WHAT WE FIND WITH THIS CANADIAN RUNNER-UP FOR THEIR OWN VERSION OF BEST PICTURE OSCAR ("THE SWEET HEREAFTER" WON) IS AN INCREDIBLY MATURE, HONEST REDISCOVERY OF ONE MAN'S OWN FANTASIES MIXING WITH THE REALITIES OF A COMPLETELY DISFUNCTIONAL FAMILY UPBRINGING OUTSIDE THE "BIG CITY" OF HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA. WHILE THE PREMISE MAY BE SIMPLE, A GAY MAN COMING HOME FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 10 YEARS FOR HIS SISTER'S WEDDING, THE EXECUTION IS A WORK OF ART UNTO ITSELF. NOT A PART IN THE PIECE IS THROWAWAY, NOT A SHOT EXTRANEOUS. EVERYTHING YOU SEE AND HEAR IS THERE FOR A REASON, OR AS YOU'LL FIND OUT, FOR MANY REASONS THAT ONLY SITTING QUIETLY AND ATTENTIVELY UNTIL THE VERY LAST CREDIT ROLLS WILL YOU FULLY COMPREHEND. IT'S TRULY A SHAME THAT THIS REVIEW COMES FROM HAVING SEEN THIS FILM TWICE LAST SUMMER IN A THEATRE FOCUSED ON SHOWCASING INDEPENDENT FILM AND NOT FROM HAVING SEEN IT ON VIDEOTAPE IN MY OWN HOME. FROM SOME SOPHOMORIC, REASONLESS CONCLUSION, THE PRODUCERS OR DISTRIBUTORS OF "THE HANGING GARDEN" HAVE REFRAINED FROM RELEASING THIS FILM TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC ON VIDEO AND DVD, THE TWO MEDIA WHERE THIS FILM WILL SHINE THE BRIGHTEST, AND WHERE IT IS NEEDED MOST. THIS IS, IN ALL CANDOR, ONE OF THE HANDFUL OF FILMS FROM THE LAST FIVE YEARS OF FILM WHICH MIGHT ACTUALLY HAVE AN AFFECT ON SOMEONE'S PERSPECTIVE; DARE I SAY A LIFE-CHANGING IMPACT, EVEN! IT'S A STORY FROM WHICH YOU LEAVE ALTERED, SEEING THE WORLD AROUND YOU WITH NEW EYES, AND IT NEEDS TO BE SEEN BY MORE PEOPLE; IN THIS COUNTRY, AND AROUND THE WORLD. MAYBE THERE'S A WAY WE CAN FIND TO TIP THEIR HANDS, INSISTING THEY GIVE US THIS AND OTHER FILMS WITH SIMILAR PASSION AND PROFESSIONALISM THAT CAN TRULY BE SEEN AS ART WHICH TRANSCENDS ITS MEDIUM.
Rating: 
Summary: What if your past became your future?
Review: A very strange and moving arty film about a man who returns home to see his dysfunctional family and begins to get haunted by ghosts from his past. Told in a series of flashbacks that come to life, during the course of the story it reveals that the handsome, successful man was, as a boy, an overweight confused homosexual that was tormented by his belligerent, overbearing father. When the skeletons in the closet start to come to life he is forced to confront incidents in the past in order to survive the future.
Rating:
Summary: Multilayered and complex
Review: A very surreal portrayal of a highly dysfunctional family. Imagine that you went back to visit your parents to attend your sister's wedding but, wait, you committed suicide ten years earlier, and your sister's husband-to-be was your first lover, and your dad is an abusive alcoholic and your mother is insufferably codependent and you fathered a child after having hetero sex for the first time...Doesn't this sound like heaven?... Sweet Williams' pilgrimage into his own tormented past and the visitations which his inner child and adolescent pay him during his "return" home after a ten year absence are truly remarkable. Not for the faint of heart. Very cerebral.
Rating:
Summary: rich in metaphor
Review: after reading through the reviews of this movie, i'm going to relate what i think separates and consequently elevates this film above others. it has the proto-typical drama of estranged son against a dysfunctional family, but it clearly moves beyond this. "american beauty" has the dysfunctional family with the happy gay couple next door, but what probably makes this movie hard to swallow and digest is its non-linear development, and its exchange of internal metaphors. the garden is used as a vehicle to link parts of the movie--it is used in the beginning/middle/end of the movie as well as the main character's life: he grows up learning the different flowers there and 'kills' himself metaphorically in the middle and eventually buries the family dog in the end. if you want the exact plot, play by play, other reviews go through it. what interests me the most, is its ability to translate 'magic realism' as if you were reading a novel of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Elements of fantasy and inner thought are translated into metaphor and being for all to see and understand. The sister sees the dead brother hanging in the garden and understands its meaning, transformation. That the movie defies categorization is a good thing. so many movies rely on typical plot scenarios or drama to generate the narrative. Here the viewer is confronted with displaced images and is left thinking about "what am i watching?" and also "what was the director's intentions?" In this day of trite movie plots and direction, that is a refreshing feeling.
Rating:
Summary: Fully logical in my view
Review: Death indeed takes many forms, and Thom Fitzgerald presents one of them here in a very dramatic way. William comes home ten years after his, but it was of course not an actual death, rather the termination of a life of obesity, ridicule and insecurity. Fletcher's rejection, and the ensuing small-town gossip, are what finally caused him to flee to the big city and cut off all communication with family and friends. He returns, reborn as a slim, handsome urbanite, who will not be satisfied until that rejection is reversed. There is a lot of confusion among viewers of this film regarding the corpse that appears to be hanging in the garden. While at least three family members recognize it, it has never physically existed. William has survived the suicide attempt (rather than give in, he is still struggling when the scene ends), and is thus alive ten years later. What hangs from the tree is the broken spirit of a very troubled boy--and the entity that reveals the undercurrent of the plot. Though in appearance a mature adult, William behaves at Rosemary's wedding as if he were trying to experience the childhood he missed. He is late for the ceremony, is dancing with his grandmother in her attic room while he is supposed to be with the rest of the wedding party, and hides under a table during the reception so he can throw flower petals onto the grass for guests to slip on. The pleasures of youth are abruptly halted when he must take care of his drunken father and then help organize a search for his missing mother. Compounding the difficulties are visions of himself as a young boy, using food to assuage hurt feelings, and of course the hanging "corpse." Later, as both of them envision the corpse, Rosemary reveals to William that she opted to hold her wedding in the garden so as to remember her brother as he "left," rather than as he "came back." Although she doesn't want to let go of the overweight, "Sweet William," the adult will have no part of it and sees his chance to put it all to rest when Fletcher comes on to him down on the dock, the site of an earlier affectionate encounter. After confirming that he holds great attraction over his brother-in-law, William fakes an asthma attack (he has no problem running up the hill), and goes to bury the corpse. Having given up on reliving the past in a more pleasant way, he opts for putting it to rest so he can start anew. Whiskey Mac, like Rosemary, wishes to hold on to the boy he knew ten years ago. It is revealed that he, too, has sensed the corpse when William tells him he has buried it. Devastated, the father tries to exhume it, but the son will not permit him. Of course no physical remains would appear, as none exist, but William doesn't want his father going through the motions of digging up what should be left in place. As George adamantly stated to Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the boy is "dead" and there is no use bringing him up again.
Rating:
Summary: Fully logical in my view
Review: Death indeed takes many forms, and Thom Fitzgerald presents one of them here in a very dramatic way. William comes home ten years after his, but it was of course not an actual death, rather the termination of a life of obesity, ridicule and insecurity. Fletcher's rejection, and the ensuing small-town gossip, are what finally caused him to flee to the big city and cut off all communication with family and friends. He returns, reborn as a slim, handsome urbanite, who will not be satisfied until that rejection is reversed. There is a lot of confusion among viewers of this film regarding the corpse that appears to be hanging in the garden. While at least three family members recognize it, it has never physically existed. William has survived the suicide attempt (rather than give in, he is still struggling when the scene ends), and is thus alive ten years later. What hangs from the tree is the broken spirit of a very troubled boy--and the entity that reveals the undercurrent of the plot. Though in appearance a mature adult, William behaves at Rosemary's wedding as if he were trying to experience the childhood he missed. He is late for the ceremony, is dancing with his grandmother in her attic room while he is supposed to be with the rest of the wedding party, and hides under a table during the reception so he can throw flower petals onto the grass for guests to slip on. The pleasures of youth are abruptly halted when he must take care of his drunken father and then help organize a search for his missing mother. Compounding the difficulties are visions of himself as a young boy, using food to assuage hurt feelings, and of course the hanging "corpse." Later, as both of them envision the corpse, Rosemary reveals to William that she opted to hold her wedding in the garden so as to remember her brother as he "left," rather than as he "came back." Although she doesn't want to let go of the overweight, "Sweet William," the adult will have no part of it and sees his chance to put it all to rest when Fletcher comes on to him down on the dock, the site of an earlier affectionate encounter. After confirming that he holds great attraction over his brother-in-law, William fakes an asthma attack (he has no problem running up the hill), and goes to bury the corpse. Having given up on reliving the past in a more pleasant way, he opts for putting it to rest so he can start anew. Whiskey Mac, like Rosemary, wishes to hold on to the boy he knew ten years ago. It is revealed that he, too, has sensed the corpse when William tells him he has buried it. Devastated, the father tries to exhume it, but the son will not permit him. Of course no physical remains would appear, as none exist, but William doesn't want his father going through the motions of digging up what should be left in place. As George adamantly stated to Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the boy is "dead" and there is no use bringing him up again.
Rating: 
Summary: Give this one a miss
Review: Despite some favorable online reviews here, I found this filmboring, slow-paced, predictable, and very dated in its psychological profiling of gay family issues. The Catholic, dysnfunctional, conservative family themes are trite and overworked, the erratic attempts at surrealism are poorly thought out and don't hang together with the rest of the film, and its somewhat offensive that the massively overweight gay teenage boy must lose all his weight and become an Adonis in order to make his life work. One keeps waiting for the story to kick in, but it never really does. May be of interest to younger gay men and women who need to seem themselves mirrored in cinematic art, but this is a snore fest.
Rating:
Summary: Nothing to get hung about
Review: Despite some rhapsodic reviews for this film, I must say I thought it was very run of the mill and ultimately disappointing. 27-year-old Sweet William, a gay man, returns to his home in rural Nova Scotia to attend his sister's wedding. Now a slim, handsome man, William is revealed to have been a massively obese teenager suffering the twin tortures of being gay and fat, and experienced a life crisis which drove him away from home. Now a happily settled waiter/actor living and working in a big city, William confronts anew the anxieties that beset him as a teenager and ultimately drove him to a failed suicide attempt. At age 17, William had an interrupted sexual episode with a hot youngster named Fletcher. Their sexual explorations interrupted by William's horrified grandmother, Fletcher loses his nerve and terminates the tentative relationship. William's mother takes William to a local prostitute to verse him in the ways of heterosexuality. William, heartbroken over Fletcher's abandoning of him, tries to hang himself in the yard, but is discovered and cut down by his alcoholic, abusive father, after which, we are told, William leaves and ultimately loses well over a hundred pounds. The specter of the suicide attempt haunts the whole family. During the present day section of the film, we learn that William's sister is marrying Fletcher, who might now be called Fletch the letch as he is deeply drawn to the now-slender William. William's sister, the new bride, laughingly encourages her husband to make love to William (my date had trouble believing that a new bride would be that broadminded, although the film took pains to paint her as extremely wild-n'-crazy). When Fletcher finally gets William alone and starts kissing William, William suffers an asthma attack (oh, yeah, he's asthmatic) and William must symbolically bury the memory of his suicide attempt. Disappointingly, he never does have sex with Fletcher. Instead, he discovers that a ten-year old girl with lesbian tendencies who has been living with his parents is actually his love child with the prostitute who deflowered him. At movie's end, he takes her back to the big city to his partner and his life and leaves behind his family. The whole film is extremely low-key, and most of the situations and characters are extremely trite and one-dimensional. The writer evidently hoped to make the dysfunctional family be wildly chaotic and "interesting" but most of the characters and situations seemed to come from central casting and movie-of-the-week situations. The actor who plays William is quite attractive but never reveals much of his inner life (most of his story is told in an extended flashback). There are major attempts at combining surrealism and symbolism with naturalism, and in most cases it's either annoying or clumsy. This might be a decent movie for families of gays or for very young gay men who haven't seen the last hundred "coming out" movies, but it lacked dramatic structure, pacing, strong performances (except for the fat boy who plays the teenaged William), sexual interest (except for the hotty who plays Fletcher) and startling insights. The family is Catholic of course, so there's a huge religious overlay on top of the rest of the angst--mostly expressed thru the grandmother's religious fixation on the Virgin Mary. Really a very dull evening overall.
Rating:
Summary: Struck a chord...
Review: Everyone's family is crazy, right? Sweet William's family, in which everyone is named after a plant, might just leave you missing your own weird relatives. He's been gone for 10 years, lost a huge amount of weight, and transformed his life. Yet his family has stayed relatively unchanged and he feels himself falling back into the familiar patterns of fitting in with their dysfunction. There is his alzheimer-ridden granny in the attic whom everyone treats like a strange doll. His newly-wed sister, Rosemary, ascerbic but somehow endearing, and her groom, Fletcher, who has and has had an erotic obsession for William since childhood. There is the oddly masculine girl, Violet, blonde and potty-mouthed. Their father is an affectionate but abusive drunken gardener; their mother a bitter and and controlling woman on the edge of an emotional breakdown. The film slips in and out of time, exploring the world that brought William to manhood: his memorization of plants and their harvesting times as a small child--where a mistake led to a slap, his first sexual exploration with Fletcher, his loss of virginity with a prostitute arranged by his mother, his grandmother's condemnation of his homosexuality, his own hatred of self. Like a drumbeat throughout the movie is the question William answers by the end: "Why am I doing this to myself?" His acceptance of his family and the responsibility that being in a family brings gives the movie a tidy and serene closure. I'd recommend this movie to anyone with siblings and skeletons in the closet. It is the sort of film that Canada tends to produce--a film that would not do well in American cinemas, but that thoughtful people will enjoy.
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