Amy Koppelman’s adaptation floats in a haze of ethereal lite-tragedy towards its end and lacks explicit storytelling passion
Amy Koppelman directs this movie, which she has adapted from her 2003 novel: a painful, intimate, sincerely intended study of a young woman’s postnatal depression. Amanda Seyfried plays Julie, a children’s author who had a self-harming episode while she was looking after her infant son and after the birth of her second child is reluctant to take antidepressants. The tone is unsubtly set when Julie’s psychiatrist, played by Paul Giamatti, quotes Sylvia Plath’s poem Balloons. Was that a well-chosen author to invoke in the circumstances?
Finn Wittrock plays Julie’s too-good-to-be-true dreamboat of a partner Ethan and Amy Irving has a cameo as Julie’s mother, separated from Julie’s father – whose own history of mental illness is supposed be a contributory factor, though the coy, blurry Super-8 memory flashback-sequences don’t give any clear hint of how exactly his disorder manifested itself. At one stage, Ethan complains that he is walking on eggshells around Julie. So is the movie. In between her first and second pregnancy, Julie is nervous and upset at the idea of moving out of their apartment to a lovely house in the country, an issue which takes the film a little close to #FirstWorldProblems territory.