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Reviews Counted:25
Fresh:19
Rotten:6
Average Rating:6.5/10
Consensus: Canvas is a faithful portrayal of mental illness highlighted by terrific performances.
Theatrical Release:Oct 12, 2007 Limited
Synopsis: This debut feature from director Joseph Greco is the semi-autobiographical tale of a 10-year-old Florida boy, Chris (Devon Gearhart), who returns from a summer in Alaska to find his mentally ill... [More]
Starring: Marcia Gay Harden, Joe Pantoliano, Devon Gearhart, Paul Lasa
Director: Joseph Greco
Movies don’t come more personal than Canvas, writer/director/co-producer Joseph Greco’s serious-minded exploration of the devastating effects unleashed by mental illness upon an otherwise tightly knit American family.
Though Canvas may not deviate much from the formula followed by so many other movies about families imperiled by health crises, it's unusually perceptive about the ways that loved ones process (or fail to process) the resulting stress.
Top CriticAuds will experience the joy of discovery in Greco's fact-based drama -- not just in its perspective on schizophrenia and the effect of the disease on one Florida family, but in Joe Pantoliano's cliche-demolishing performance.
Top CriticCanvas is a serious film about mental illness and a sentimental heartwarmer, and succeeds in both ways.
Top CriticA pair of well-shaded performances by Joe Pantoliano and Marcia Gay Harden dignifies a sincere but innocuous look at a blue-collar husband’s struggle with his wife’s schizophrenia.
Writer-director Joseph Greco's refusal to explain the roots of Mary's madness gives John's desperate desire to summon happier days a bewitching poignancy.
Greco takes his biggest risk, perhaps, when he puts that boat in water with father and son manning the sails. It could be a mawkish scene that sinks everything that came before it, but like the watercraft that symbolizes so much, the movie remains afloat.
[A] strong first feature.
It's like a public service announcement with dialogue.
Top CriticGreco's sincerity is so palpable that the frequent uplift feels deserved, but with just-passable filmmaking and the demeaning score, Canvas falls somewhere between powerful indie and made-for-TV diversion.
Top CriticCanvas is a movie that rings emotionally true, despite structural contrivances and dim, washed-out color.
Top CriticThere is something to be said for a filmmaker like Greco who takes the truth -- no matter how tough it is -- and turns it into a compelling drama about people we might know in life.
Small and slow-moving, and not in a way that means finely detailed and pensive.
First-time filmmaker Joseph Greco draws on personal experience for this devastating yet honest portrait of an ordinary Florida family.
Top CriticGreco succeeds where many others have failed in giving a real sense of what it is to grow up with a parent who's hobbled by mental illness.
The director happens to know the often maligned subject of mental illness well from his own childhood as the son of a psychotic mother, and he embraces it with genuine feeling, emotional spontaneity and absence of consciously formulated dramatic pretense.
Canvas is worth seeing for the acting, but the disease-of-the-week conventions and hackneyed visuals pretty well knock the wind out of its sails.
Top CriticAn absence of detail means that Canvas teaches little about what it's like to be mentally ill or to know someone who is.
Writer-director Joseph Greco makes a nice feature-film debut telling a true, disturbing story about a 10-year-old boy struggling to cope with a schizophrenic mother.
Top CriticAn unusually sensitive take on schizophrenia.
Top Critic
October 11, 2007:
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