NORMAL

Grief has always been a dramatic staple in the movies, and Normal is indeed well-intentioned, showing how a tragedy can paralyze witnesses and loved ones for years, or even a lifetime.

Normal is an Ordinary People for the new millennium. Well, at least it wants to be. Normal takes place in an extremely picturesque, extremely well-off suburb of an unnamed Canadian metropolis (turns out it was filmed in Victoria,BC). The characters walk around glum and dazed with grief that hangs over the entire film like a lead blanket. Carrie-Anne Moss,playing a grieving mother, has bloodshot eyes for the entire first half of the film, if not more. Her teenage son Nicky—a All Star basketball player and apparent golden boy—was killed two years earlier in a car accident involving a drunk driver, and she simply can't move on.

Callum Keith Rennie (Battlestar Galactica) plays a professor having a sort of mid-life crisis who has a fling with the local shallow weather girl who happens to be one of his students (the same way he met his disgruntled wife, funny enough). His own personal life and demons seem to keep him in upheaval, yet he is still the rock for his adult autistic brother, who has not stepped out of his own house in two years.

Rounding out the trio of main characters, Kevin Zegers (Transamerica)is a young man who has just been released from jail after two years for car theft. He moves home with his angry cranky father who has anew,gorgeous young wife who feels, well, neglected. The surly young man and the lonely young wife seem to clash at first, but we all know that as sexual tension. Dude, she's your step mom!

You can imagine that these three story lines will eventually come together and intertwine, à la Crash.As good as the cast is (the leads are all notably good, and it is a relief to see Rennie play someone with a softer center than, well, a Cylon), they don't get much to work with as far as the screenplay.There are a couple surprises in the plot, but you can pretty much piece together how all the characters fit in relation to each other within the first half hour or so, then you check your watch, wondering how they are going to fill another 80 minutes of screen time.

Grief has always been a dramatic staple in the movies, and Normal is indeed well-intentioned, showing how a tragedy can paralyze witnesses and loved ones for years, or even a lifetime. Except the filmNormal seems to meander aimlessly, kind of like the lives of its characters. The dramatic conclusion seems inevitable, arriving like a sign rather than an exclamation. And by that time the audience feels drained by the film—in the same way that the characters have been drained of the will to move on with their lives.