 Ridley Scott's Matchstick Men, starring Nicolas Cage, is being faulted for something that Scott himself rarely evidences in his films: sentimentality. "Ridley Scott goes all gooey," Renée Graham writes in the Boston Globe. But that same characteristic of the film appears to work for a number of other critics. A.O. Scott in the New York Times makes this observation about the plot, which, in part, concerns the reunion of a conman with his teenage daughter. "The movie's idea of parenthood is a familiar one, at once cautionary and comforting: having a child, it suggests, will wreck your life, but it will also make you a better person. (This notion, needless to say, is wildly narcissistic, absurdly melodramatic and unconscionably sentimental. It is not, however, altogether inaccurate.)" |
