Jayne Mansfield's Car (2013)
Average Rating: 5.4/10
Reviews Counted: 33
Fresh: 11 | Rotten: 22
Jayne Mansfield's Car assembles an impressive number of talented actors, but the screenplay -- co-written by director and star Billy Bob Thornton -- never gives them much of anything to do.
Average Rating: 4.7/10
Critic Reviews: 11
Fresh: 1 | Rotten: 10
Jayne Mansfield's Car assembles an impressive number of talented actors, but the screenplay -- co-written by director and star Billy Bob Thornton -- never gives them much of anything to do.
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Average Rating: 3.1/5
User Ratings: 1,142
Movie Info
In what critics are calling his best work as writer/director since SLINGBLADE, Academy Award (R) winner Billy Bob Thornton stars - along with Oscar (R) winner Robert Duvall, two-time Oscar (R) nominee John Hurt and Golden Globe winner Kevin Bacon - in this story of fathers and sons, wars and peace, and the turbulent time that changed America forever. It's 1969 in a small Alabama town, and the death of a quirky clan's long-estranged wife and mother brings together two very different families for
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Cast
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Billy Bob Thornton
Skip Caldwell -
John Hurt
Kingsley Bedford -
Kevin Bacon
Carroll Caldwell -
Robert Duvall
Jim Caldwell -
Robert Patrick
Jimbo Caldwell -
Ray Stevenson
Phillip Bedford -
Katherine La Nasa
Donna -
Frances O'Connor
Camilla Bedford -
Shawnee Smith
Vicky Caldwell -
Ron White
Neal Baron -
Tippi Hedren
Naomi Caldwell
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Jayne Mansfield's Car Trailer & Photos
All Critics (33) | Top Critics (11) | Fresh (11) | Rotten (22)
There's a terrific movie struggling to escape from this overplotted, overedited, overdetermined stew ...
Top CriticIt's one thing to explore the messiness of familial relationships and regret against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, and something else entirely to try and shove every jot and tiddle in place before the closing credits roll.
Overall, the rambling "Jayne Mansfield's Car" is almost as big a wreck as its namesake.
In its best moments, you can see what the film might have been with half a dozen fewer characters.
The scenes in which good ol' boy mentality clashes with stuffy British sensibility are a highlight. Still, both cultures are depicted through cliches.
By a certain point the deliberate pokiness and lackadaisical attitude toward character development and resolution feels like spilled food that never gets completely wiped up.
The truly superb cast of Jayne Mansfield's Car sputters in this confused melodrama that is more pre-occupied with explicitly saying everything rather than genuinely saying something.
It's obvious that Billy Bob Thornton is attempting something meaningful with Jayne Mansfield's Car. It's just tough to figure out what it is.
The inconsistent tone and melodramatic tendencies unfortunately cancel out strong portrayals.
A uniformly fine cast and some infrequent moments of storytelling genius keep Jayne Mansfield's Car steady most of the time.
With its sprawling array of characters and anecdotal, ramshackle structure, [the film] feels more like a collection of interrelated short stories cobbled into an flavorful but ultimately unwieldy narrative.
Thornton manages to balance these themes with interesting and damaged characters while also creating a strong family dynamic.
War is hell, duh. That's still all I can figure Thornton's film amounts to.
Jayne Mansfield's Car isn't likely to set America's theaters on fire, but it's a powerful whisper of a film.
Thornton, Duvall, Bacon, Hurt and LaNasa part of a rich ensemble taking a trip in 'Jayne Mansfield's Car.'
Thornton's approach is liquid enough to allow for a few poignant and unsettling moments, keeping the film captivating and organically felt before it becomes unbearable.
"Jayne Mansfield's Car" is a bit of an oddity in that there's not really much of a plot to speak of, giving it the feeling of a film that's adrift as it searches for something to do.
It just sits there, in the process dispensing with so much leaden dialogue and half-formed narrative threads that it manages only to bring together lots of fine actors in the beautiful rural southern sunshine.
Jayne Mansfield's Car is cluttered with characters and subplots, and only a few of them resonate at all.
Audience Reviews for Jayne Mansfield's Car
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| Good cast boring story | 24 days ago | 1 |
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