Rating: 
Summary: Not Connecticut, not Hartford, Not Today, thank goodness
Review: I saw this movie because friends who write print reviews wanted my take on whether this was a realistic depiction of Hartford in the 1950s, a place and time I lived there. After seeing this movie, I can see that the director and production designer was NOT trying to make this appear in any way to be Hartford, but to you as it as a kind of cover for a general setting typical of unrealistic, totaly set produced films of the 1940s and 1950s that this picture tended to emulate. No one from Hartford in this era would think of it as Hartford, the vegitation is different, it was obviously filmed in a much smaller town, the husband was depicted as working in the television industry which does not or did not exist in Hartford then or now, while Hartford was the center of world aircraft component production then, a typewriter production center, and the "Insurance Capital of the World," in the 1940s and 1950s.
None of the people in the film talk like people in Hartford or even Connecticut speak. The georgraphy of segregation is just so different from what we see.
But I think the idea is to make a movie that is not actively realistic, a movie whose environment is choked, stranguled trapped the way the protagonists in this movie are. They're trapped by things that remain problems: sexual repression, homophobia, racism, the oppressiveness of this society's fiction of marriage, class prejudice etc. However, in the time these problems were incalculably major and massive. They could only be depicted in the kind of noir neverworld where the score communicates depths of emotion and crisis that the times have no words for the characters to express.
Rating: 
Summary: Horrible impersonal cliches
Review: This film was horrible. The way they presented and dealt with the issues in this movie was so text-book impersonal and artifical that it was border-line offensive. The issues were presented in a laughably cliche manner, and dealt with in a non-human, politically correct way. Furthermore the movie moved verrry slowly and didn't have much laughs or comedy to uplift it. The only thing I could see being likeable about this movies is the 50s style. If you don't want your intelligence, and your emotions offended please don't see this.
Rating:
Summary: Kindly Pass the Emetic
Review: For the first hour I thought this was an incredibly beautiful re-creation of an extinct genre. For the second hour I thought this was one of the worst films ever made. The unfortunate thing about this movie is that the glorious first hour is used as a launching point towards what amounts to an unending sermon about political correctness. Twenty years or so ago a movie like this might have been regarded as cutting edge, and deservedly so. Now, it's just a sorry anachronism, in a double-sense of the word. It's an anachronism not only because it employs a dead genre. It's also OLD-FASHIONED because there have been so many films which have tackled these themes in infinitely more courageous ways. Nowadays, there's nothing daring or interesting about making a film like this. It's just incredily boring. God, I hated this movie! Then again, the movie also has my grudging admiration for patronizing, within the time-span of less two hours, three distinct demographical entities: heterosexual upper-middle class whites, blue collar blacks, and homosexuals. Is there another movie in history that has managed to patronize all three sub-groups within the same film, and yet comes out saying nothing original? While I admit this is genius, it's not the sort of genius I generally admire.
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