Jul 8, 2005 7:46 am US/Central
Dark Water
Richard Roeper: "Rent It"
(CBS)
Jennifer Connelly is talented and extremely camera-friendly, and she has an Academy Award for her work in "A Beautiful Mind," but one of these days she's going to have to lighten up. In "Dark Water," she's once again playing one screwed-up chick.
From "Requiem for a Dream" to "House of Sand and Fog," Jennifer Connelly specializes in playing gorgeous but
seriously disturbed women. She spends a lot of time in these movies with her hair wet, staring at her own
reflection in the mirror and wondering if she's crazy. In "Dark Water," Connelly plays Dahlia, a financially strapped, soon-to-be-divorced mom who just might be going insane.
That's Chicago's John C. Reilly in a crackling performance as a double-talking broker who adds an extra coat of B.S. to his sales pitches, free of charge. This is clearly one scary building, with a creepy handyman lurking in the entranceway, a couple of teenage punks roaming from floor to floor and lots of mysterious water leaks.
This movie is based on a novel by the same writer who penned "The Ring," and the storylines are remarkably similar. In both cases, a young single mother fears she'll lose her own child to the spirit of deceased child who was killed by drowning. They might as well have called this "The Ring 3."
Even when she's covered in muck or coming apart at the seams, Connelly looks great and creates a sympathetic portrait of a emotionally unbalanced woman--but the PG-13 "Dark Water" is just too familiar and too meandering to pack a serious punch. You can wait to
Rent It.
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