The screenwriter took many liberties with the text to make this movie a more "adult" film, and I found this really disheartening since this is not what T.C. Boyle intended it to be. I'm not against "adult" movies (i.e. nudity), but there a few things that occur in the movie that do not occur in the book at all.

The ending of the movie was to most "let's tie this up real quick-like" ending I've seen in awhile, and in fact, the ending (where all the main characters meet to watch the "san" burn down and then slowly walk away) didn't even happen like that.

I know, I know.... it's like comparing apples to bananas to pineapples, but I just want others to know that if you've read the book, don't bother with the movie. If you haven't read the book, then you'll probably get a bit of a kick out of the really quirky movie. Laura Flynn Boyle plays an excellent patient with "green sickness" (this was before she became unusually thin). There is a great cast of actors involved as well. Nice to see them play characters outside of what they normally do.

I have thought for years that the novel upon which The Road to Wellville was based was written by the loathsome Garrison Keillor. Well, my copy showed up in the mail the other day, and I found out the novel was written by the far more easily-digested T. Coraghessan Boyle, so I decided I wouldn't exile the wife to the living room to watch this alone as I had planned.

What a horrible mistake.

The Road to Wellville chronicles, supposedly, the doings of a number of folks in the late nineteenth-century, all presided over by cornflake inventor John Harvey Kellogg (Anthony Hopkins). The story centers, if there can be said to be a center, around the Lightbodies, Eleanor (Bridget Fonda) and Will (Matthew Broderick), who come to Kellogg's sanitarium in order to recover from an unspecified disease of Will's (his wife confides in someone later what it is, and it's something of a major plot point). Also weaving through the tale is that of Charles Ossining (John Cusack), who gets involved with Kellogg's outcast adopted son George (Dana Carvey) and a crook named Bender (Michael Lerner, the "lost another loan to Ditech!" guy). And we haven't even begun to cover the principal actors yet, much less the cameos.

You may already be able to see where I'm going with this. If so, feel free to skip to the end of the review.

I've always considered Alan Parker an inconsistent director, but while mulling this travesty of a film over, I realized why. The movies he made early in his career that worked so very well (Midnight Express, Fame, The Wall, etc.) are movies where a lot of stuff is going on, and the viewer is being bombarded by stuff from every direction at all times. That's how the movies are written, and they succeed very well.

The movies he's made since then have had scripts that are more focused (or, in the case of The Road to Wellville, were in desperate need of more focus), but Parker is still using the same technique. And we're still getting bombarded when we require focus. Simply put, there's too much going on in any two hours of Alan Parker celluloid, and whether or not it works has to do with the material rather than the director or the actors. After all, Parker has a history of getting fantastic actors to work on his films (perhaps another thing; in every movie Parker made until Birdy, he was working with a cast of unknowns. Starting with Mississippi Burning, he started getting the A-list) and do things that could very well destroy their careers. I'm amazed that, after this mess, Hopkins, Broderick, Cusack, and a number of others survived with their careers intact.

Yes, this is a mess. Provides a few good one-liners here and there, but is basically the grown-up version of the unfunny teen sex comedy (and I can never say that without saying "American Pie and its sequels are not funny, and if you think they are, you're wrong"). Will probably be enjoyed by those who thought Scary Movie was a laff riot. Everyone else can safely stay away without feeling like they've missed anything. **