Being Flynn Reviews and Ratings


  • casillase1
    May 12, 2012
    casillase1
    A writer dealing addiction meets his estranged, drunken and delusional father at the homeless shelter he volunteers for.That's the premise of Being Flynn, an uneven but emotionally hard hitting film from writer-director Paul Weitz.

    Taken from Nick Flynn's 2004 memoir Another Bul... read morelshit Night In Suck City, Being Flynn is saturated in deep sadness. The excellent Paul Dano (Little Miss Sunshine, There Will Be Blood) is Nick, a struggling writer, poet and playwright drifting through his twenties and then takes a job working at a New York City shelter where his girlfriend, Denise, works (lovely Olivia Thirlby). When he sees his father, Jonathan (Robert De Niro) he's floored. Jonathan too is a writer, one who thinks he's on the same level as Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway and J.D. Salinger and talks constantly of his opus Memoirs of a Moron, and also reveals truths about Nick's childhood and his mother (Julianne Moore) who has her own troubles.

    The film plays as an emotional face off between the father and son, with narration provided by Nick who hopes to better understand his troubled father. Dano displays amazing subtlety and nuance, a perfect foil to De Niro's often flamboyant performance. Weitz first directed De Niro in Little Fockers, but here he employs the actor's too often forgotten skills, one that recalls his emotionally charged performance in Awakenings. It's a marvelous performance from an old master.
  • fb1112584705
    April 19, 2012
    fb1112584705
    De Niro knocks it out the part with this one, his acting chops back to their old, youthful form! Dano really shows some range here and carries the film with relative ease. My movie of the year so far. Get to CAMELVIEW to check this out!
  • threenails10
    April 14, 2012
    threenails10
    Paul Weitz's return to form here. Very well done, and part of me didn't like the first half of the film. It wasn't what I expected it to be. I didn't know much of anything going into it, and I'm glad that I didn't. The film is very emotional, and sometimes it intends to be funny ... read morebut is a lot more dark than it knows. I loved all the places these characters went, and I was surprised that it wasn't mostly Robert De Niro that makes this film so good, but the intentional main character here played by Paul Dano, who plays one of the writers of this film itself. Very impressive stuff, and hard to watch at times. You come to understand these characters by the end. With a second viewing, I believe I'd come to love this piece of work even more. Well worth a look, and one of the better films to come out so far this year.
  • fb576433743
    April 1, 2012
    fb576433743
    Seems a tad pointless at times, but still a very watchable and quite interesting look at a difficult father-son relationship. There's no false sentimentalism here; Nick and Jonathan seem to have genuine problems liking each other at times, which offers a rather refreshing change ... read moreand keeps this from meandering into typical schmaltzy family drama territory. Although we're left without a sense of having reached any particular destination and with a nagging suspicion that some baggage has been left unclaimed along the way, it's still a rather affecting film with an unsurprisingly solid performance by Robert DeNiro, who seems to be having rather a good time playing a largely unsympathetic crank.
  • xbza006
    March 28, 2012
    xbza006
    Jonathan (De Niro), whom plays an ill writer, along with Nick Flynn (Dano, his son), attempt to understand each other flaws. Overall......an AWESOME FILM!
  • fb712625704
    February 27, 2012
    fb712625704
    In which Robert De Niro plays a crazy racist violent taxi driver. An adaptation that doesn't really have any reason to exist as a film.
  • 1ManWolfPack
    February 15, 2012
    1ManWolfPack
    RELEASE DATE UNKNOWN

Summary

Being Flynn Summary