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Down in the Valley
Generally favorable reviews
Based on 33 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 19 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama | Romance | Western
Written by: David Jacobson
Directed by: David Jacobson
Release Date:
Theatrical: May 5, 2006
DVD: September 26, 2006
Running Time: 114 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: R for violence, sexual content, language and drug use
Starring Edward Norton, Evan Rachel Wood, David Morse, Bruce Dern, Rory Culkin, Artel Kayàru, and Ellen Burstyn
When Harlan Carruthers (Norton), a charismatic cowboy who seems as if he would be much more at home in Monument Valley than in the San Fernando Valley, has a chance encounter with Tobe (Wood), a bored and restless suburban teenager, both of their lives are turned upside down. (ThinkFilm)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Dahmer
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
It's mysterious and bold at every turn, and refreshingly removed from the commonplace.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Stephen Hunter
Down in the Valley is exactly what we don't have enough of: It's singular, unusual, unexpected, fresh and familiar at once.
Read Full Review >Premiere Glenn Kenny
The movie belongs to Wood, who creates a unique portrait of a girl hesitating at the threshold of womanhood; she's smarter, more attuned, and more spiritually ambitious than those around her, but also too decent and loyal to break from the world she knows-and too unformed to have a grasp of what she wants outside of that world. It's fantastic work.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Down in the Valley is a wild thing that sticks with you long after it's over. You know, a real movie.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ken Fox
Driven by Edward Norton's and Evan Rachel Wood's riveting performances, writer-director David Jacobson's tense drama samples bits of cinematic Americana from sources as diverse as "Shane," "Badlands" and "Taxi Driver."
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
Jacobson and his actors do so much with the characters that they leave an ambiguous residue of blood-streaked regrets and sadness.
Read Full Review >Dallas Observer Bill Gallo
A psychotic we can't help falling for, Edward Norton's beautifully drawn and richly nuanced dreamer could, in time, prove to be one of the most memorable movie characters of recent years.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine David Edelstein
The best thing about Down in the Valley is that you hope it's not going where you have an inkling it's going. The purity of Norton's madness is a wonder.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
Writer-director David Jacobson has a good eye for widescreen compositions and sustains a low-key note of dread but is less successful in his attempt to graft a neo-Western to a neo-noir.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Allison Benedikt
Jacobson, whose earlier film is a docudrama about Jeffrey Dahmer, is clearly fascinated with men who would be monsters. It's a ripe and infinite topic to explore, but without Norton, theme alone could not have sustained Down in the Valley.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly F. X. Feeney
Writer-director David Jacobson has an excitingly clear-eyed, unsentimental feel for the intensity of adolescent passion.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Stephen Holden
Begins semirealistically, then veers off course, hurtling into the wild blue yonder of myth and allegory. On the way to a climactic shootout that begins on the set of a Hollywood western and ends on a foggy hillside, it makes several screeching, hairpin turns.
Read Full Review >Variety Scott Foundas
Result is imperfect and overlong, but hugely ambitious and often breathtaking.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
As it progresses, the film takes us to another borderland, that between reality and delusion. This is where Harlan's mind freely gallops.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
Down in the Valley is one of those pictures you root for even when it goes badly wrong.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
When a movie begins to present one implausible or unwise decision after another, when its world plays too easily into the hands of its story, when the taste for symbolism creates impossible scenes, we grow restless.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
The performances are deep and rich -- Wood is coming to seem like a smarter Chloe Sevigny, Rory looks to be the Culkin with talent, and Norton's portrayal of Harlan aches with ambiguity.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
Down in the Valley becomes increasingly harder to believe as it goes along, with people behaving in ways that strain credibility.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Felix Vasques Jr.
An original and utterly unconventional tragedy of fantasy and reality, and the potential lethal results of worlds colliding. Ed, glad to have you back.
Read Full Review >The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann
What keeps us watching? Chiefly it is Edward Norton's performance as Harlan. It is hard to doubt his belief in everything he says, no matter how silly or dangerous it sounds.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Mark Olsen
For a film that has allegedly undergone extensive tinkering following its premiere at last year's Cannes Film Festival, Down in the Valley abounds in nagging loose ends and suffers overall from logy pacing.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker
The film is thrown off balance by the weight of Norton's compassion for this troubled soul.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Both actors work hard to give this disturbing crime story some flavor and substance, but the narrative is overextended and poorly organized.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
In the end, it's really just a thriller, slower than most, with pockets of dead time but with a few extra flourishes, too, thanks to Norton.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marrit Ingman
It feels mechanical, more conceptual than realized, like a senior project by a particularly ambitious student who's recently read "West of Everything" – and who's lucked into working with a world-class actor.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
As long as Norton plays Harlan as a modern-day Joe Buck, a kind of four-in-the-afternoon cowboy, we're drawn by his waltz of innocence and vagueness. But Down in the Valley turns out to be one of those films with a thick, gummy overlay of Western ''mythology.''
Read Full Review >Village Voice Rob Nelson
Like "Don't Come Knocking," this contrived lament for the lonesome cowboy means to measure what remains of the old western in the absence of the Old West, eventually plopping its displaced ranch hand protagonist onto the fake Main Street of an old western movie set just to make sure we don't miss any of the cine-mythic connotations.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
Edward Norton serves as lead actor and producer, but even his star power won't help this misfire reach a wide domestic audience.
Read Full Review >New York Post Kyle Smith
Sucker-punches you. It appears to be an engagingly sweet romance, but it's really just about other movies.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jack Mathews
The movie turns into something strange and annoying, an attempted blend of a suburban thriller with an Old West shoot-'em-up.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
While Jacobson navigates the first half of Down in the Valley deftly, he loses his way in the second.
Read Full Review >Empire Ian Nathan
Never has the term 'American Independent' so obviously been code for 'wholly miserable experience'.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 6.4 (out of 10) based on 19 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
patrizia p. gave it a10:
I love this movie and I think edward norton is the best actor in the world! to Liz: norton può avere un grande ego ma ha anche un enorme talento che voi americani non sapete appezzare.
liz gave it a2:
VIsually beautiful, big yawner. Terrible movie experience. Edward Norton an enormous talent? Enormous ego unmatched by talent.
Rich R. gave it a3:
Started out interestingly, I'll give it that. Edward Norton? One of our best young actors, no doubt about it. But this just imploded about 2/3 of the way through. Sorry. I really wanted to like this movie. Plus the Dad part was really dumb. The girl was good, though. The little brother? Boring, with bad hair to boot.
Nathan T. gave it a2:
While I can't answer the rhetorical question posed a few entries back (for everyone at least), I can explain why for me anyway, "Down in the Valley" ranks with "Basic Instinct 2" as one of the year's worst and most unpleasant experiences. This is a movie where much happens, and it's all unbelievable. Many things are said, usually mundane or just scraps of better dialogue. Oh and how dreadfully boring! Director David Jacobsen absolutely squanders the enormous talent of Edward Norton and the up and coming Evan Rachel Wood. She plays Tobe (short for October, isn't that cute?), a 16-year old in the Valley who falls for the cowboy gas attendant, Harlan, a solid performance by Norton. So far, so decent. But the way their romance unfolds has about the plausibility of the relationships on Fox's "The OC" and they have to contend with her father Wade (played by David Morse). But Jacobsen cruelly presents the father as heartless and physically abusive of her and her brother, played by Rory Culkin (who has an almost creepy affinity for his big sis). Pa yells when she comes home one morning without informing him of where she was; she acts like it's the Inquistion. We're expected to somehow sympathize with her, despite the fact that her dad is right to be concerned that she's sleeping with someone who's at least a decade older that her. "Down in the Valley" starts off clumsily but intriguing enough, fails to be a character study of the twisted Norton character, and then gets harder and harder to look at. In the last 35 minutes or so I felt like a ceiling was falling down on me and also morally icky. Moral ambiguity and unease can often supplement a brittle screenplay, but it's the last thing this dreadful film needed.
Jordan S. gave it a4:
It really doesn't matter how visually interesting this film may or may not be. The fact is, the script is as dull and plodding as the script of this guy's last movie, DAHMER. If we had a nickel for every director who knew how to move a camera or create an arresting image, we'd all be able to retire. But how many of them can write? Not many. And how many can really get a great performance out of a willful, self-absorbed actor like Edward Norton? Again, not many. Certainly David Jacobsen doesn't manage to pull it off. The entire film has the feel of being hijacked by its leading actor, much to the detriment of the whole. The conceit of this neo-western is as hackneyed as some of the ideas behind the Hollywood blockbusters DOWN IN THE VALLEY so studiously attempts to avoid replicating. After a promising first half hour or so, it all goes downhill in a pile of bizarre cliches and self-conscious pontificating about the nature of contemporary American society. Another user comment suggests that audiences just aren't smart enough to "get" this movie. I suggest that some of us are too smart to fall for its rather obvious and literal attempts to be "artful." Take a look at BADLANDS again. That film is exactly what DOWN IN THE VALLEY would like to be, but falls way short of in its blatant mimicry.
Jamie W. gave it a10:
A highly under-rated film. Simply wonderful.
Ken G. gave it a3:
A mess. One of those movies that couldn't make up its mind what it wanted to be, so it ended up a sloppy hodgepodge of 5 ot 6 different movies. Movie wasn't really sucessful in it's first half, but in the second half it becomes ever more ridiculous to the point where you realize that filmmakers just stopped caring about the believeability of their story.
