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70So unexpected and unpredictable and so full of tiny grace notes that its ultimate collapse seems almost irrelevant.
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50Anselmo, basing his script on a true story, juggles more plots than a full season of "The O.C.," setting his cast adrift in a sea of soap-opera bubbles.
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50The performances are strong, although undermined a little by Anselmo's peculiar style of dialogue, which sometimes sounds more like experimental poetry or song lyrics than like speech.
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50The film's biggest problem is its psychologically false ending. Having created a complex relationship, Anselmo seems to throw up his hands at the end and admit he doesn't have a clue about how to resolve it.
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50Though there's nothing especially terrible about Stateside, there's nothing terribly special about it either.
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50If the contrast between Marine life and blue-blood luxury sometimes pulls the film in awkward directions, Anselmo's perceptive fondness for all his characters -- parents, children, grunts, even drill sergeants -- more than compensates.
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40The finely observed moments in Stateside accumulate little emotional power. The promise of something startling and compelling goes unfulfilled, and the arc of the central love story isn't interesting enough to sustain the drama.
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40Freighted with far more serious issues than most movies of its kind but neglects or glosses over most of them.
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40Stateside's real-life frame allows the complexities of mental illness and military service to lose dramatic tension, resulting in a desultory home stretch of group therapy, tears, and reconciliation.
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The film is plagued by Anselmo's inability to focus on the heart of his story.
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40This has its moments--most of them thanks to Kilmer and Joe Mantegna as the boy's abusive father--but the troubled romance is unconvincing and the big-name actors hang on the story like ornaments on a spindly tree.
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38Ultimately, Stateside ends up a diluted, scattered drama--less than the sum of its parts, but with an impressive cameo list.
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30A mess.
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30Partially biographical story of a rich kid's unplanned encounter with the Marines and his even more random romance with a schizophrenic movie starlet is contrived and emotionally incomplete, and strained further by self-consciously cockeyed dialogue.
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30It's hard to know which is more annoying: The fact that writer-director Reverge Anselmo makes Dori's schizophrenic look like little more than a cute, sexually available lush or that he makes Mark's Marine act like a jarhead with nothing inside except fireflies.
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25Anselmo handles sensitive issues not with kid gloves, but with a metaphorical baseball mitt, fumbling with tone and obviously laboring to force quirks upon characters and situations.
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25Writer-director Reverge Anselmo has created a movie of ineptness so perfect and unified as to boggle the mind.
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25If you were looking for an actress to play a tempestuous, schizophrenic movie-slash-rock star, you might go for Courtney Love or Angelina Jolie, or maybe even Jennifer Connelly. But Rachael Leigh Cook?
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20An unsalvageable mess.
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LindaE.10