“The Roads Not Taken Is a Plea for Compassion”

I have a lot of issues with the way Sally Potter’s new film frames a conversation around the difficulties of living with and caring for a loved one struck by dementia; most of those issues are exacerbated by the fact that she has personal experience with that awful trauma. Is this her way of exorcising her demons over her relationship with her late brother, who died in 2013 after struggling with Pick’s disease? Is she asking us to care for people with dementia, or is she judging those people? How does she manage to give the appearance of not understanding what dementia does to a person’s brain?

I appreciate the filmmaking and the weird pseudo-Inception method of exploring the interior of a man operating under the influence of dementia, but I don’t know, I think this script needed a judicious edit. Maybe we can give her a mulligan on this one; she is a ridiculously good filmmaker.

You can read my full review over at Paste Magazine.