Film Review-Personal Effects

Personal Effects, starring Ashton Kutcher & Michelle Pfeiffer, is a very moving film. The outcome wasn’t a happy one. There were no ‘happily ever afters.’ It was a very sad movie.
It started when Linda, Michelle Pfeiffer’s character, met Walter and his mother Gloria, Ashton Kutcher’s character & Kathy Bates’ character respectively, at a support group for family members who were murdered. Walter’s sister was brutally raped & murdered and left in ditch somewhere while Linda’s husband was murdered in a drunken episode by one of his friend. He also was survived by his deaf son, Clay, played by a virtual unknown, Spencer Hudson. They not only knew each other through the support group, they saw each other in the courthouse for the murders of the respective kinfolk. Walter’s mother won’t go to the trial because she had to take care of her granddaughter, her daughter’s daughter. Walter came home after the murder of his sister to be there for the trial of her sister’s accused murderer. He dropped everything including being a college wrestler in Iowa to getting a dead-end job as a chicken for a fast food place. No, seriously! He dressed as a chicken, and all he got were rude comments.
Linda’s son had a lot of anger in him, pulling the gun-the only prized possession of his father’s that he had-on bullies and breaking windows of the perpetrator who killed his father. Thank God Linda gave the gun to Walter. Walter rescued Clay from bullies.0 When Clay pulled the gun on them, Walter took the gun away, and Linda gave it to Walter. Walter got Clay into wrestling as a way to deal with his anger about the death of his father and being deaf. He won his first match with Walter’s help. Yay! But half the time Walter wasn’t able to understand what Clay was saying since he was always signing (ASL).
Linda worked at weddings, but she got too emotional, crying all the time, so she decided to bring Walter along for the ride. Bringing Walter along helped her tremendously. When she started crying, he hit her. She was so surprised, she hit back. But when she didn’t stopped crying, he tried squeezing her thigh. Still, it didn’t worked. So he hit her harder, and she laughed through her tears. Afterwards, she continued asking him to weddings. No more tears! One time, at one of the wedding receptions, they got very intimate. Linda, the more experienced one, started it. But they didn’t stopped there.
Gloria wanted to sell her daughter’s stuff in a rummage sale, but she needed Walter’s help take out the stuff because they were too heavy. When the sale occurred, she wasn’t ready to part with her daughter’s things. At the end, she had no choice because the sale was final.
The verdicts were finally in. Suspense. On-the-edge-of-your-seat suspense. In Linda’s case, the verdict was guilty. The murderer was found guilty. But in Walter’s case, the verdict was found not guilty. The accused was sent home that day. He was acquitted. When Walter confronted him, he said that he was helping his sister at the time of her murder. When Walter found this out, he decided to go back to Iowa (he saw no point in no looking for the real killer),Clay felt unjustified that even though his father’s murderer was found guilty, his friend, Walter’s sister’s accused murderer was found not guilty, so he decided to take matters into his own hands. He was angry about the verdict, to say the least. No doubt about it. When Walter was about to change his mind about moving back to Iowa, he heard what Clay was going to do: he decided to exact revenge. He wanted to kill Walter’s sister’s accused killer, but Walter blocked the way. He saved the accused murderer’s life but not his own. Now, Clay was in prison for accidentally killing his friend. He was the one who had been narrated the whole movie.
Ashton Kutcher is an astounding actor! I never knew he has it in him! What a great perfomance! It is a very moving movie. He reached out to the young man and his mother when they needed him the most and vice versa. He was their rock. He was dependable, reliable, a shoulder to lean on when things got rough and good with Clay at telling him to go out for wrestling so that he can used his anger for good, but in the end, it was null. It didn’t work, as Walter had hoped. Clay was still an angry young man. At the world! At the unjustice of the world!
Clay used his anger at Walter’s sister accused murderer getting acquitted by seeking revenge. He accidentally killed the wrong guy; Walter tried to saved the acquitted’s life, but he died trying to help him. After Clay killed his friend, he spoke for the first time. He was sent to prison. Maybe being in prison’ll make him less angry towards the world.