|
Orphaned at a young age when their parents were killed in a car crash, Sammy and Terry have remained close despite the different paths their lives have taken. Married and divorced at a very young age, Sammy is a devoted if somewhat overprotective mother to her eight-year-old son, Rudy. She is very rooted as she lives in the same town her parents did, in fact, in their very house. Terry, on the other hand, leads a troubled and drifting existence. Moving from city to city, town to town, Terry has no real home, not real friends, or any real goals in life. He seems to land wherever the wind takes him. When Terry comes home to borrow money from Sammy, a disaster in his own life, that of his “girlfriend” attempting to commit suicide, compels him to stay with Sammy and Rudy for a while and try to get his life together. However, Sammy has been too routinized and overprotective of Rudi, and finds Terry to be too wild and irresponsible to be a reliable friend or role-model for her son. With good intentions on every side, Sammy and Terry's conflict personalities bump heads again and again throughout the movie. Sammy at the beginning of the movie seems rational. She has a steady job at the bank and has a very structured, stable and routine life. She has been dating the same man for a couple years, although he isn’t ready to commit. It is clear that she loves Rudi very much, however she tends to be an overbearing mother, sheltering her son from the harsh realities of life. Sammy is bitter about her ex-husband and won't talk to Rudi about him and has closed that chapter. She believes that Rudi’s fantasies are healthier for him than the hard cold reality. She is, however, aware of her efforts to shelter Rudi. She admits this when she says that “someday he was going to find out that people suck”, but that he was too young to learn that quite yet. After the arrival of Terri, Sammy slowly begins to become irrational about details of her once “so structured” life. Bob is finally ready to make a commitment to Sammy and asks for her hand in marriage. However, her affair with her boss, Brian, is quite irrational. Although she knows that Brian has a pregnant wife at home, she is selfish, whether for lust or office politics, and continues this affair. At times, her actions seem to be almost unconscious, and at other times, very conscious. The start of the affair with Brian seemed to happen in the heat of the moment, which would be largely unconscious. However, her ability to end the affair later on was very conscious, as was her choice to not marry Bob in light of her current irrational actions.
Approximate Word count = 1826
Approximate Pages = 7.3
(250 words per page double spaced)
|
|
