Critic Reviews

Black seems to be aiming for some sort of loopy fantasia, a tragic fable about struggling with difference in the small-town South, but he's got more half-finished ideas than he can handle.

It's all rather wacky and hard to follow or fathom, although maybe that's attributable to Virginia's schizophrenia veering off on its delusional phase.

Black loses control of Virginia as it lurches from political satire to unintended black comedy to mom-and-son melodrama. But the performances and the movie's sheer crazy audacity make it watchable.

Virginia is like a box full of someone's long ago summer vacation keepsakes: pretty, but representative of memories and meaning no one else will be able to grasp.

A scattershot Southern melodrama that can't decide what it's supposed to be.

It also serves to undercut fine performances by Connelly and Harris, whose choices are constantly destabilized by scripted swings between comedy and drama, realism and fantasy, genuine catharsis and indie-film ornamentation. Black's overactive melodrama is more than a representation of schizophrenia; it's the embodiment of it.

The movie as a whole falls victim to a dewy kind of Tennessee Williams-itis, as Black plops too many wanna-be, colorful twists - imminent illness, botched robberies, fake pregnancies - into what is at heart a gently heartbreaking rendering.

Connelly, Harris and Amy Madigan, as Tipton's devastated wife, all do their best to bring a measure of soul to Black's creations, but there's something fundamentally synthetic about Virginia, which lays bare its influences without doing much to reanimate them.

A strong cast can't save Virginia.

Unfortunately, there's little sympathy granted to these people, and the revelation of their hidden vices comes across like an increasingly mean series of punchlines.