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Perfect cast and a good story

Good start, but then it gets ruined

For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

" I've read a ton of patronizing and harsh reviews of this film that nearly dissuaded me from seeing it. From the very beginning, it seems the viewer has a distinct choice to make: filter the entirety of the film though the lens of reality/cynicism, OR embark on a visceral journey back to a time and emotional space of innocence lost. From a purely pragmatic point of view, this movie amounts to little more than over-dramatized emotional drivel: the cinematic equivalent of the most-maudlin-ever Morrissey record being played on infinite loop. However, if you choose to return to the space of innocence lost, you will no doubt be invited to recall the many dark, magical, and brooding charms of adolescence. You'll remember falling in love for the first time; the ways in which you conceptualized and romanticized death; your growing estrangement from your family...and well, maybe even your first Smiths record. When experienced as a multi- faceted coming-of-age metaphor, this film resonates deeply without trying too hard to create a pseudo-sense of nostalgia. If you: 1) are a grumpy adult 2) never wrote a poem just for the hell of it and/or 3) have always secretly wanted to donkey-punch Morrissey, you may dislike...or even loathe...everything about this film.

A high school dropout who crashes funerals is on the verge of getting his comeuppance when he is rescued in a meet-cute by a quirky female who tells him she works in a cancer ward for kids. In fact, she herself is a patient, and the two youngsters bond during the last three months of her life.The films' triumphs are it largely avoids sentimentality, achieving a bittersweet, elegiac tone, though mostly (perhaps deliberately) falls short of pathos.Those triumphs are lightly scattered through however, in a sea of boring or bizarre moments that fail to gel into any meaningful whole. Enoch (Henry Hooper) lost his parents in an automobile accident that left him in a coma for three months. This means he missed his parents funeral, which he still fumes about. He blames his aunt for holding the funeral when he couldn't attend. I am not sure if the writer intends Enoch to come across as an ignorant brat here - you rail against the woman who cooks and cleans for you because she did not hold up a funeral indefinitely to see if you lived or died? Enoch's dullard credentials are further established when he states, having 'died' for three minutes after the accident, that there is nothing after death - despite the very clear evidence of him having a ghost for a best friend. He ludicrously takes a sledgehammer to his parents' gravestone, but never thinks once to ask his friend from the afterlife to help him contact his parents. He's quirky, he's marginalised, and totally implausible.Unfortunately, Annabel (Mia Wasikowka in a tonally flawless performance) falls for him, and has to put up with playing catalyst in Enoch's redemptive narrative, despite the fact that her tale is more interesting and more of a challenge. An implied jealousy with her sister is only lightly touched upon, and a hard-drinking mother is shown but the problems that would inevitably throw up are regrettably not explored.I suspect the families of young cancer victims might not welcome this depiction. Annabel skates, runs in the forest, and has sharp eyes and a fabulous complexion - all the while dying of cancer. Pacific War veterans - on both sides - might also have a few issues with Hiroshi (Ryo Kase giving it a decent go), the kamikaze ghost. Quite what this character's function is remains problematic. There is no disputing he is meant to be real - the shot flow makes it definitive, having him stand outside Annabel's house to witness her physical demise. (Slight tangent, but why does a ghost that no one can see feel the need to stand outside and peek in the window? He could stand naked on the kitchen table for all it matters). At times his comments seem to encourage Enoch to recognise the ephemeral nature of life and live it to the full. At other times, he seems strangely ambivalent about his kamikaze role - is his relish for playing 'battleships' meant to be ironic? He is pedantic about labelling hara-kiri properly as 'seppuku', but he is happy to be called kamikaze when tokkotai is more accurate. When he changes clothes, finally, he dresses like the Emperor Hirohtio in the infamous photo with Macarthur. What, intertextually, is going on here? As much as the three young leads are easy on the eye and know their acting chops, the characterisation is vapid and hardly explored, and the pronouncements on life, death and the meaning of the universe are bitty and contradictory. For the last thirty minutes, I was literally struggling to stay awake.It reminded me of Shunji Iwaia's 'Vampyr' - lots of healthy-looking young people moping about pontificating about death, inside lovely pictures, adding up to pretty much nothing.

"Restless" finds Henry Hopper playing Enoch, a teenager who has recently lost his parents in an accident. Enoch thus finds himself caught deep in an existential rut. He visits funerals, dresses in dour clothes, is obsessed with death, resolves to give up on life, views everything as being intrinsically "meaningless" and routinely converses with an imaginary Japanese kamikaze pilot. Other morose totems litter the film: dangerous train lines, graveyards, corpses, hospitals, Halloween nights, ghosts, games of battleship, funeral parlours, diseases etc. The film is preoccupied with death.Things get contrived when Enoch meets Annabel, played by a young Mia Wasikowska. Annabel has cancer, is about to die, is fond of wings, birds, flight and Darwin, and is upbeat and grateful despite her imminent annihilation. She, of course, teachers Enoch to love himself, life and be eternally grateful for "whatever few moments he is granted". Both characters wear Euro-chic and look like they've stepped out of a 1960s Godard movie.The film is essentially a shameless rip-off of Hal Ashby's "Harold and Maude" - and the countless "oh my God my lover is dying of cancer" romantic weepies it inspired – only more formulaic, less smart and less touching. But it was directed by Gus Van Sant, a gentle soul, who manages to lend the film some kind of credibility. You sense that Van Sant understands these people, identifies with them, and you can feel him trying to skirt over the film's more contrived moments.Van Sant's career tends to alternate between sappy Hollywood dramas and micro-budget, minimalist pictures ("Elephant", "Last Days", "Paranoid Park"). "Restless" merges both approaches; a kind of sappy minimalism.7.5/10 – Van Sant did this stuff better with "Last Days".

Mia Wasikowska seems to be drawn to these quirky indie movies, and she should be because she's good at them. She's the best thing about Restless, a drama about an emotionally wounded young man, a dying young woman, the ghost of a Japanese kamikaze pilot, and birds. Unfortunately, she's not the main character. That's Enoch, played by Henry Hopper. He's just not right for the role, and veers between unlikable and uninteresting. Restless also seems a bit unfocused, as well, as if the concept wasn't properly expanded by the writer into a full story. It starts off with promise, only to lose some of my interest on the way to the mishandled ending. As a result, the movie just isn't everything it could have been. I liked it, it's just hard to not be somewhat disappointed by the wasted potential. There are resonant moments throughout the story, but there are just as many scenes that just seem hollow or misplaced. Restless could have been very good, instead it's just okay.