unexamined sociological assumptions.

January 9th, 2009
A. O. SCOTT: “it is worth comparing ‘Not Easily Broken’ with another, much-written-about film about a marriage in crisis, Sam Mendes’s ‘Revolutionary Road,’ which has energetically solicited the admiration of reviewers and awards-giving organizations. That movie, it seems to me, is fatally compromised by pretension and bad faith, by its refusal to engage with the lives of its characters other than by means of a secondhand literary conceit and a set of unexamined and dubious sociological assumptions.

‘Not Easily Broken’ certainly has its own, fairly transparent, ideological agenda, but is nonetheless a thousand times more honest, and more humane, than Mr. Mendes’s preening work of ersatz art.”

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