"A Home at the End of the World"

Clare, Bobby and Jonathan form a love triangle with all the arrows pointing in various directions at once, and at one time or another each takes a turn being the odd man or woman out. The story might be described as "Boy meets boy; boy loses boy; boy reconnects with boy and then meets girl; boy loses boy while keeping girl; boy and girl reconnect with boy; boy and boy lose girl." And so forth. But an undercurrent of commitment and devotion always flows, circuitlike, through the three of them.

It's easy enough to grasp the point of "A Home at the End of the World," yet none of the one-on-one relationships ever quite jells: We're left to nod knowingly at the movie's sensitivity while never feeling a whole lot for any of the characters. When Bobby and Clare become romantically involved, Jonathan becomes envious -- but earlier, he'd made a point of distancing himself from Bobby. Human beings often do inexplicable things for unfathomable reasons, but a story can run aground pretty quickly if we run out of sympathy for a character too early on, and as Roberts plays him, Jonathan just seems sulky and childish.

Penn is, as always, a serene, stalwart presence, but the role of boho den mom doesn't serve her well. (Then again, who could be well served by such a role?) Farrell pours a great deal of earnest toil into his performance here, even when he's given the thankless, recurring task of casting sidelong lovesick glances at Jonathan. Farrell wasn't sought out for this role; he went after it, and there's no doubt he hoped it would allow him to prove his seriousness as an actor. Farrell is gifted, and there are moments here where he adds glimmers of subtlety to some very clunky, faux-perceptive material.

The problem, though, is that Smith, the actor who plays the adolescent Bobby, sets us up for a very different character from the one Farrell plays. Smith has a stunning scene with Spacek (who is, characteristically and predictably, warmly believable): She has caught him and Jonathan smoking a joint. Bobby, instead of being flummoxed, holds it out to her without giving it a second thought. Smith captures both the winsome vulnerability and the ingrained self-possession of the young Bobby; he makes us curious to see what kind of man Bobby will grow into.

But as Farrell plays him -- and as the story, for some inexplicable reason, demands -- Bobby becomes too much of a lost-boy grown-up: He's a deep-fried naif. Are we supposed to attribute this to the acid his brother gave him, or to his frequent marijuana use as a teenager? While it's perfectly understandable that Bobby would be a bit emotionally lost, it's not really clear why this intelligent, open-hearted kid would end up as a grown-up version of a special-needs child: Sometimes Bobby hangs around helplessly as the other grown-ups around him take charge, which just doesn't mesh with the mysterious man-child we met earlier, the one who so boldly, and with so much subterranean certainty, held out that joint to his best friend's mother.

The grown-up Bobby is much less interesting -- your typical "He's not different, he's special!" character. Similarly, the movie he's rattling around in is neither different nor special, as much as it tries to convince us otherwise. "A Home at the End of the World" strives to open our minds, instead of operating on the assumption that we've already got them open and waiting, with all their receptors turned on and willing. It's a by-the-book exercise in free thinking.

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