Edward and Rebecca were married once, now they’re divorced. He’s seeing a woman named Tina, whom he’s in the process of disenchanting; she’s remarried, to Roger, a foppish English emigre who runs drug tests for pharmaceutical companies and wooed her on a cruise to Nova Scotia. Before they broke up (actually, before they were even married), Edward and Rebecca produced Susannah, aka Sukey, who matured into something of a monster: “She was brutal,” Edward recalls. “And mean. Cutting up clothes, burning holes in things. That’s meticulous. You have to want that.”
The problem starts with Donnelly’s script, which takes an oblique approach to Edward and Rebecca’s grief. Edward cultivates a comic, slacker persona, enhanced by an appetite for alcohol so strong that he keeps a full fifth of Jameson in his carry-on bag. Throughout, we get the vague but strong suggestion that his desire for a smooth vibe contributed greatly to the train wreck his family became. Rebecca makes gestures toward confronting him at first, hoping to clear the air, but the truth is she likes his sad-sack style. That plus 80-proof lubricants seem to constitute their bandwidth, and they fall into it in a practiced, easy way.
