Dorathen Better Late Then Never

SteinMo What a freaking movie. So many twists and turns. Absolutely intense from start to finish.

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Darin One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

tfmiltz This movie is something you might expect if Freud and Hitchcock got together for an evening of drinking and writing.You never really do know what will happen next.Sybil comes to mind I suppose.The entire childhood is the Greenroom (Louise Fletcher Sybil "What happened in the green room Sybil").This movie could have gone many ways.It will not haunt you, but it will leave you in subtle shock I think at the margins of human experience. Maybe it erodes the margins - it dances on the edges of maps.In fact, they SHOULD have put in Dylan's My Back Pages - but it's probably best no anchor to reality is made in a soundtrack etc. After all this isn't Juno.All I know is the description said a train wreck changes a small mid western town unexpectedly.And I do say- that was an accurate assessment.a Clark bar anyone?

daggersineyes This is a surprisingly good movie that's well worth your time to watch. The story is OK, could've used a little fleshing out & judging by some of the negative reviews - maybe it needed to explain itself more. Although I think sometimes it's good to have movies that don't make it easy for the audience. The problem is, the audience don't support movies that are difficult so a perfectly good production often gets shoved aside (as this one did) in favor of more conventional straight-forward brain-candy.The characters needed a little more development and it lacked a lot of suspense that could have been introduced. BUT the direction was generally good, there was some lovely camera work & thoughtful framing throughout which resulted in a great evocation of mood and vaguely sinister under-tones (just wish they'd gone somewhere more sinister!!). The back-story was intriguing but they rushed through that when it might have been better to expand on it - certainly it would have introduced more thrills & creepiness. But even so, the story works well enough and is thought-provoking and even heart-warming at times.BUT the stand out in this movie is the acting, particularly by Cillian Murphy. Many people have already mentioned it was Oscar worthy and I'll add my voice to that opinion. I've never seen anything quite like it. I wish he'd been given a more gritty story to apply that amazing talent to in this movie. It was so close to getting there but just missed getting the edge it needed to make it a great movie. I was totally in love with Emma. She was portrayed so beautifully I was in her corner no matter what!! :)I also agree with many others that a lot of viewers missed the point and nuances of this movie so they thought - incorrectly - that there was nothing to it. There's too much reliance these days on a movie having some awesome "twist" and if it doesn't deliver said "awesome twist" it's "pointless" or boring. I'm not sure when "twists" became a prerequisite to being an interesting flick. Peacock has it's share of twists (more than one) but they are small and do not define the movie. They are there to move the story along not to be clever. Peacock is better thought of as a character study revolving around what happens when a perfectly & obsessively ordered (right down to the minute) but pretty much insane lifestyle suddenly has the rug pulled out from under it. Despite it's flaws this movie is a lot better than a large percentage of the stuff that ends up in wide theatre release and it's a crying shame this was just dumped to DVD without so much as a whisper.Watch it - if only to see the awesome performance of Cillian Murphy. Even most of the negative reviews acknowledge how amazing he was. Most of the points I've given this movie are there because of him.

MBunge If you've seen Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, heard about it, talked to somebody who saw it or basically just been alive for any length of time since the movie was first released, you don't need to see Peacock. That's because as well acted as this film is, and as adorable as Ellen Page always is, this is a story about what Norman Bates would be like if he didn't kill people. So, it's like Psycho but without any danger, mystery or purpose. I glanced at the "making of" feature on the DVD and co-writer/director Michael Lander seemed proud that he made a movie that doesn't do anything you expect. That's true, but only because Peacock doesn't do much of anything at all. It hints at this and it alludes to that and it references the other, without ever delving deep into any of its chosen subject matter. This is a well crafted nothing.John Skillpa (Cillian Murphy) is crazy. Most of the time he's himself, an awkward, brittle, almost autistic man who works at a bank and can barely communicate with other human beings. In the mornings, however, he's Emma and she cooks John's breakfast, washes his clothes and peeps through the curtains at the children across the street. And no, John's not a transvestite living in the 1950s small town of Peacock, Nebraska, though I couldn't help thinking that would have made a much more interesting story. John's a full on split personality like Psycho or Sybill or Raising Cain. And it's clear before the opening credits are over that it's because John was abused by his mother.It's unclear how long John has been existing this way but when a railroad accident deposits a train car in his back yard and the whole town of Peacock suddenly learns of John's "wife", that existence starts to change. Emma begins to take over more and more of John's time and becomes a functional person, even as John becomes more frazzled and anguished. Eventually, Emma and John face off over small town whore Maggie (Ellen Page) and her son by John. Co-writer/director Lander apparently thought he could fake out the audience by first making John appear to be the unstable one and Emma the normal personality and then pull the ol' switcheroo, but he only fakes out himself.Peacock is wonderfully performed. Cillian Murphy isn't exactly doing anything you haven't seen before, but his John and Emma are quite well conceived and executed roles. Susan Sarandon as the proto-feminist wife of the town's mayor and Page as the girl from the wrong side of the tracks are really good. Graham Beckel as an avuncular political operative who wants to stage a rally at the train in John's backyard and Bill Pullman as a shifty bank manager are great living scenery. The problem is that at the end of the film, you've seen some nice acting and that's about it.You can sympathize or empathize with the insane but it's awfully hard to identify with a nut job, especially when you're expected to just assume all the reasons why the person is crazy. There are no flashbacks to explain John. There are no digressions to explain Emma. The viewer is simply presented with this loon and is supposed to care about him. Since it's difficult to identify with a whacko, you can try to connect to him through his relationships with normal people. However, Peacock is overstuffed with supporting characters who never interact with John or Emma in more than superficial ways. There's a local cop, the bank manager, a neighbor, the Mayor and even Sarandon and Page's characters never get below the surface of either personality. Maybe if it had only been the triangle of Emma, John and Maggie or if the central conflict was the liberated-for-the-1950s mayor's wife drawing the Emma personality out of John's orbit or if the story's focus had been on the local cop as the closest thing John has to a friend trying to figure out where his never before seen wife came from, maybe that would have given some direction and edge to this motion picture. There's none of that, though. All Peacock has is the twist of trying to make you think John is the bad guy and Emma the heroine, only to flip it around. But he's crazy and she's a delusion. The real twist would have been playing it straight and arguing that madness is sometimes the healthiest and sanest reaction to this world.If you're a fan of actors or don't know what the words "Alfred", "Hitchcock" or "Psycho" mean, you might like Peacock. For the rest of us, it's a waste of time.

e5312 As a start I have to add that in my opinion this movie was not a thriller. Yet it is really worth to talk about, so here it comes.We're facing a quite interesting life here. John, your typical quiet bank clerk is a man with a serious case of dissociative identity disorder, caused by his irregular relationship with his mother in the past, a typical case of Freudian archetypes (usually I disagree with them when talking about the case of the mistakes mothers make when raising their children, but in this very movie I couldn't refer to anything else). In short, ever since the day his mother died, he cross-dresses and pretends to be a nice and friendly woman -who most people think is his wife-, Emma. Fighting the demons of his past, he's starting to loose control. The whole situation is driving him insane, making him unable to stop his alter ego, who seems to be taking over control and doing things he would never do. The ending most likely will not be what you were expecting for. It is quite sad on its own way.The even better reason to treat this movie as something special is the amount of amazing acting in it. By checking the three main characters, you could already tell that you won't see anything disappointing, at least not at the acting part. And let me make this clear, my high expectations were fulfilled. I think I haven't seen such excellent acting in a really long time, so if the subject doesn't really interest you, you can still watch it for a memorable cinematic experience.Oh and Susan Sarandon, she will never get too old to look beautiful. Her character was so warm and lovely, it fit her really well. Ellen Page (as the main cause I watched this movie for) also did great, the character of Maggie was impossible to not love. The scene when she told Emma how she got pregnant and started crying simply made me wish to be there and hug her. And of course -as most critiques mentioned-, CM really deserves an Oscar for his acting in this film. Playing such a complicated character as John Skillpa seemed to not cause him any problems, so as always all we can say is well done! If you wanted to see this movie for chills, I do not recommend you to watch it, but if you're open to see an interesting life story with lovable and realistic characters who could easily be people living next door or who you meet at the nearby store, I think you will really find this movie entertaining and will make you stop and wonder about how normal you and your life are.