We first meet Arden (Toni Collette) in the opening section, titled simply The Stranger, as she struggles to care for her abusive mother in what appears to be a rather run-down home. As Arden takes a walk, she comes across something rather unexpected in the field – the body of a young woman. For reasons known only to her, she takes the necklace the girl is wearing, and on returning home, she calls the police.
For a completely unexplained reason – perhaps because her mother wants to continue abusing her all by her lonesome – when she finds out that the police have come, Arden’s mother is furious with her. I’m not sure exactly what Arden was supposed to do. Perhaps she should have just left the body in the field to rot and continue to be abused by her mother. I don’t think it was really explained, and we are just left to figure out why her mother is so hateful. Maybe you can explain it if you have seen it, but I certainly didn’t get it.
In any case, this sets the tone for the rest of the film.
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Posted to
Drama on March 19th, 2006 by Chad Everett
The acting in this drama was superb, especially from Kevin Bacon and Sean Penn. I find that as I watch more and more of Tim Robbins, I find that he has his characters nailed (he won an Oscar for his performance here) but they just don’t vary a whole lot. They always have the same off-kilter look, and they each make you wonder what is going on underneath the surface, but there just isn’t a lot of real depth. While I’m not the world’s largest fan of Sean Penn, I was impressed by his role here (he won too, deservedly so).
The thug-like character played by Penn is matched by Bacon’s police persona, and wouldn’t you know it? They knew each other as kids. As it turns out, Tim Robbins rounds at the trio as one of the friends who was abducted and abused one fine day while they were in the middle of some mischief making.
Penn’s character, Jimmy Markum, finds that his daughter is missing, and then that she is dead. Meanwhile, Bacon’s detective, Sean Devine claims the job of trying to figure out who did it – or at least find a reasonable suspect – before Markum uses his contacts to bring someone to justice.
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