Little Accidents (2015)

How wonderful it is to see this fine actress carry a film and carry it so beautifully.

Watch something else. There are very few redeeming qualities to this film.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

A recent coal mining accident left 10 dead and the town split. Amos Jenkins (Boyd Holbrook) is the sole survivor suffering memory lost and a limp. There is an FBI investigation and the families are looking to sue. The main contention is that one of the dead miners, Junior Briggs, had a fight with supervisor Bill Doyle (Josh Lucas) over safety but Amos is either reluctant to tell the truth or unable to recall. Bill's wife Diana (Elizabeth Banks) and their son JT find their car window smashed. Junior leaves behind his wife Kendra (Chloë Sevigny), sons Owen and mentally challenged James. One day, JT runs across the smaller Owen in the woods. They argue, JT starts chasing, and Owen throws a rock. JT falls and gets killed hitting a rock. Owen hides the body and swears James to silence. A search for JT is unsuccessful. Bill is suspended and Diana seeks solace in an affair with Amos.This movie has a nice quiet devastation. The actors are good. The visual has a good dirty grim. The young lead kid is excellent. The main problem is that the Doyles seem to stop looking for JT. There is perhaps one or two scenes of a search group. It's oddly obvious that they don't even talk about JT after awhile. It got to a point where I wondered if I missed them finding the body. It would make more sense if the Doyles' marriage starts disintegrating after finding their son dead. Their actions don't make emotional sense. This could have been a great indie except for that.

This sounded like a terrific set up for a great indie film. Great cast assembly, great look to the movie.SPOILER ALERT - Then I watched the trailer...and saw the whole movie in 2 minutes. Nothing seemed left to dramatic discovery. Maybe there are a few plot points that won't make much difference to the overall movie but all the dramatic elements were basically spoiled for me. Not going to pay to see it now...If you want to see the movie, which looks great, don't look at the trailer.

I thought this was going to be a very different movie, as in a really boring, lame, and one that I should skip. However, I liked that there was a murder in it. The summary didn't say anything about that. When that kid fell and cracked his head on the rock, my head jerked back and my eyes were wide. That was...shocking. And the other subplots, such as the coal mine accident, and the personal tragedies of many of the characters were very well done. I like that they took the time to develop the characters. It is kind of slow, so if you're expecting a fast-paced movie, this isn't it.Even though they did - as I said - develop the characters, there was no development for the relationship between Amos and Diana. 55 mins into the movie, they're in the parking lot at night and she starts touching his hand and then they hug. I don't remember any sort of past relationship those two had. That just seemed forced. Then they have sex, and that seemed even more forced. There was just...no build up. Maybe I missed something earlier in the movie.I thought the movie ended on a whimper.I gave this movie a 6-star rating. It wasn't great, but if you wanna see good acting with an OK storyline, I'd suggest you watch it. This movie was not so much about the actual mining accident as it was about the personal problems with the one survivor, as well as a grieving mother, and the killer of her son. I doubt I'd watch it again.

I wasn't planning to attend Little Accidents when it screened at the Seattle International Film Festival. With 450 films from which to choose, a film about a coal mining disaster sounded depressing. However, when I was sent a free pass from SIFF, I went anyway. Not only was I was pleasantly surprised by Sara Colangelo's debut feature film, I was moved by it. Little Accidents is the type of film that stays with you long after the lights come up. Although it is a coal mine disaster that sets the events of the film in motion, the action begins months after the accident, as Amos Jenkins (Boyd Holbrook) returns to his life in the small West Virginia town after convalescing from injuries that he sustained in the accident. He is the sole survivor.Life is anything but normal as Amos finds himself torn between telling the truth about the cause of the accident, and keeping his mouth shut, which will dishonor his ten friends who died. If he testifies that management's cost-cutting decisions led to the disaster, the mine will be closed and his friends and family will be left without any way to feed their families. Just as the town is beginning to deal with the loss of the miners, the son of one of the mine's managers (Josh Lucas) goes missing. Is it retaliation or a freak accident? Young Owen, played by Jacob Loftland (Mud), who is the son of a killed miner, has the answer, but he deals with his own struggle to reveal the truth. The character-driven film follows the seemingly parallel story lines of Amos, Owen and Diane Doyle (Elizabeth Banks), the mother of the missing boy, but eventually the parallel lives begin to intertwine as they find themselves connected by fate. The performances by everyone in this film, especially Holbrook and Loftland, are superb. A touching scene between Amos and Diane outside a convenience store nearly left me in tears. Although I felt the relationship between Amos and Dianne could have been developed further, I was fully satisfied by the completion of the plot lines and left feeling blown away by the entire experience, which was enhanced by the attendance of the director, Colangelo.Colangelo directed a 2010 short by the same name, which deals with issues of the working class. She wanted to set the expanded feature film in a mining community, after being moved by so many recent coal-mining accidents that she was unable to get off her mind. One interesting piece of information that Colangelo provided was that the movie was shot in 24 days and entirely in film, in order to capture the grittiness of the subject matter. Kodak donated half of the film.Little Accidents isn't so much a film about a coal mining disaster as it is a film about loss and how we choose to deal with the tragic events that occur in our lives. Of all the films I saw at SIFF this year, this is my favorite. The film is set to be released in January 2015. Go see it!