5.4 KiB
| box_office | date | draft | favorite | genres | image | imdb | imdb_link | metacritic | metacritic_link | mpaa | quick_look | rating | rotten_tomatoes | rotten_tomatoes_link | summary | title | year | |||
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| N/A | 2025-10-22 19:46:37+09:00 | true | false |
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https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNTk5MmIzNmQtMjU3NC00NDA5LThlMGQtNDc4MzVmNzkwMzZmXkEyXkFqcGc@._V1_SX800.webp | 6.6/10 | https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9130508 | 44/100 | https://www.metacritic.com/movie/cherry | R | Longer blurb about the movie for the top section | 4 | 37% | https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/cherry | A picture of war, the opioid crisis, codependency, and hardship that gives a strong counter perspective to the recent wave of jingoist propaganda films recently at the box office. | Cherry | 2021 |
Recommendation
I do find myself wanting to recommend this movie pretty strongly. I think it offered a perspective on war and on drugs that humanized and made personal the struggle that to me has felt very alien. The only other movie I can think of that made me feel the same way was Requiem for a Dream. Cherry doesn't really rise to the same level of art as Requiem, but I do think that the themes it tackles and the way it makes the drug abuse in particular rationalizable, gave me an opportunity to empathize with a type of person who I have previously seen as difficult to comprehend.
More than any other movie I've seen in the last year or so, I keep finding myself pondering the themes and storylines presented in Cherry. Anytime I find myself returning out of the blue to a story like that, it makes me want to recommend it, if for no other reason than that I want more people to bounce impression off of! I do really think there was a lot to unpack in this film and the Russo brothers didn't back down from presenting an emotionally potent version of those concepts.
My only hesitation in recommending this film is if the content matter is going to be too difficult for some. I would recommend reading the content warnings before jumping in, but otherwise I wouldn't hesitate to encourage you to check it out!
Thoughts (Spoilers)
As usual, these thoughts aren't strictly well organized, but there were a number of things that I wanted to talk about after watching the movie.
The Love Story / Why am I Labeling this a Romance?
Sort of didn’t believe she would stay with him when she was super flaky in the first place (which is what got them into the mess)
I like the codependent dysfunctional relationship though. I personally haven’t seen many films that went that way. I feel like what makes this a love story through and through for me is that they do stay together. Typically these sorts of films are designed to frame the abuser a bad and a classic way of demonstrating their self destruction is by ruining their relationships, but I think this movie goes out of its way to avoid that easy route.
On the whole, the very end of the movie, where Tom Holland's character is released from jail and his wife is waiting (and presumably has recovered from her addiction as well), seems a bit too happy and felt difficult to believe. It's this overly optimistic ending that makes me feel like this is firmly a love story. They end up together in the end and they've overcome their problems.
The War Storyline
The war stuff was really good. I’ve seen way too much propaganda style war movies or movies that focus more on the sheer carnage rather than the incompetence and the lack of fairness and just plain cruelty of it all. This movie doesn’t do that and you really can relate to his PTS
The stuff with his one war friend really stood out to me. In particular the scene in his car with his pregnant SO and then the scene where he can’t get the blood out of his wedding ring.
Humanizing Heroin Addicts
I felt like this movie did a good job of drawing a logical progression from an average kid doing drugs recreationally at some parties to a completely desperate Heroin addict robbing banks. At each step, he goes a little further wrong, and his motivation for going wrong is easy to empathize with.
With all the trauma of what he saw in Iraq, he's looking for an escape, so he falls back on his recreational drug habit which slowly escalates, and when he looks for outs (like when he goes to the VA doctor to get help) he's funneled right back to opioids by doctors pushing OxyContin.
We don't see the first time they progress to heroin
Rushed Ending
The jail stuff felt really under developed. I think we needed a scene or two with some actual dialog and story rather than just a montage. Part of the idea is that the whole movie is him explaining in jail about the story of his life, but I wish they would’ve merged the two timelines towards the end more explicitly.
Without a scene to act as connective tissue, it ends up feeling a bit unearned when he emerges at the end. We are shown that he goes from an uncertain member of a counciling group, to running the meetings, but there's not time given to showing him reconciling with his mistakes. Recounting them is one thing, but there's no moment where he comes to terms with what he's done, the people he's hurt, or even just coping with the stress of the war or anything.
The bad actions are given tons of room to breathe in the movie, but their reconciliation, the work that must've gone into recovering from that, is all left off screen, but we're still expected to feel like the final scene is earned in some way. It just left me feeling a bit unsatisfied.