Hmmmmmm. This crazy ass white boy is a real handful! I thought there was another twenty minutes left and then it was over. Par excellence when it comes to the intimate family scenes, a few of which shook me to my core. Less sure, convinced by the rest, but Gray is attempting something very tricky here, which is a film told in miniature yet strapped with the vastness of memory and autobiographical intent; so much of this seems to take place on a day-by-day basis which now that I think of it, is very much of a piece with many of Gray’s best films, but it seems more pronounced here: a few scenes of anxiety and unrest just before bed and how waking up the next morning can feel like an eternity has passed. A lot of Big Ideas, which is what a director like Gray (and others) feel obligated to do now, I guess, since he probably doesn’t know how many more at-bats he has left, and there’s an awkward tension in seeing that play out during some of the film’s broader passages. The film has this funereal cloud hanging over most of it which extends to the final shot; for a director who routinely nails his film's final shots, this is maybe the first of his that feels mostly predetermined in a way that didn’t quite land. What I’ll probably remember most about the film’s look at white guilt and class is that it really, really helps if you have a father who happened to fix some random cop’s hot water heater.