THIS TRIO HAS BRIO

REVIEWED - HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD: Colin Farrell gives his best screen performance as a charismatic young idealist, writes Michael Dwyer

At a time when so many movies are over-extended and overstay their welcome, A Home at the End of the World is one of those rare exceptions: an honest, compelling drama that ought to have been allowed to breathe and develop when it opts for dramatic compression. Perhaps Michael Cunningham, making his screenwriting debut with an adaptation of his own 1990 novel, erred on the side of caution, lacking the experience or ambition that marked David Hare's expert adaptation of Cunningham's later novel, The Hours.

The principal characters drawn by Cunningham in A Home at the End of the World are so engagingly etched in his screenplay and in the performances of a fine cast that one would happily spend longer in their company, all the more so given that the scenario spans 15 years, from 1967 to 1982. The movie's most endearing creation is its protagonist, Bobby Morrow, an ingenuous innocent who has grown up with death, losing his parents and his older brother by the time Bobby is 15.

He finds a surrogate family in the home of his geeky fellow student, Jonathan, and his mother (Sissy Spacek), both of whose lives are transformed by Bobby's natural goodness and the optimism and fearlessness instilled in him by his influential late brother back in the Summer of Love.

Matters come to a head in 1982, when the magnetically attractive and sexually ambiguous Bobby (now played by Colin Farrell) moves from Cleveland to share a Greenwich Village apartment with Jonathan, now a sexually promiscuous journalist, played by impressive newcomer Dallas Roberts, and a post-hippie older woman (Robin Wright Penn), both of whom fall in love with him.

Director Michael Mayer, a Broadway veteran on his first feature film, treats the emotionally conflicted characters of this complicated triangle with compassion and tenderness in a wonderfully intimate and understated movie that sets and sustains a delicately measured tone.

In his most low-key - and most effective - performance to date, Farrell responds to the material with a beautifully subtle and nuanced portrayal of Bobby - even when saddled with an unsightly mop of a wig for long stretches.

Farrell himself stretches his range admirably as he expressively personifies the past century's most idealistic era and its values. This captivating film also features a remarkable Farrell lookalike, Erik Smith, playing Bobby as a 15-year-old.