But ... I don't usually write about a movie on my blog just to say I liked it, because that's boring. There has to be an angle.
And the angle here is: the bright, sunshiny day on which two of the three characters in this poster watched the 2005 Super Bowl.
Not that this is a relevant part of the discussion, but the 2005 Super Bowl happened to have been a win for my New England Patriots, their third in four seasons, and the beginning of a ten-season drought that would end with another three in the next five seasons. If you want to know its Roman numeral, it was XXXIX.
I know it was this Super Bowl because Suncoast takes place in the days leading up to the death of Terri Schiavo, whose feeding tube was removed, leading to protests from people who believed that every life is sacred. That happened in 2005. It's more a backdrop to the character dramas here, a subtext rather than a text.
The character in the middle (Doris, played luminously by Nico Parker) and the character on the left (Paul, played with humanism by Woody Harrelson) go to a West Palm Beach seafood shack that he has recommended to her on a previous occasion to watch the game. He's one of the protesters. Her brother is dying of brain cancer inside the same care facility where Schiavo is currently residing, his own days numbered as he is fully unresponsive at this point.
And they watch the game during a Florida afternoon that's so bright that they basically have to squint.
Is this a detail that matters in the story? Hardly. Since these are not real characters, they did not have to go watch the Super Bowl. The outing could have been anything.
Which maybe makes it all the worse that the filmmakers were so careless with the details, because they literally could have been doing anything else. It's semi-autobiographical for the writer-director, which I suppose is why she included the detail, but not the correct time of day for the seafood shack meal.
So that's the detail I'm referring to: the time of day of the Super Bowl. In Florida.
As confirmed by Wikipedia, Super Bowl XXXIX kicked off at 6:38 p.m. EST on Sunday, February 6th. I remember that day pretty well. We went to my friend Gregg's house to watch the game. I had only been dating my wife for about a month, and it was her first time meeting most of my friends.
It was daylight in California, where I was. It was not daylight in Florida.
In fact, 6:38 p.m. was exactly 30 minutes after the 6:08 p.m. sunset in Miami, which is the closest big city to West Palm Beach, on February 6th.
But even in California, when it was 3:38 p.m., it wouldn't have been the blinding sunlight of midday that we get in this film.
Does this matter in the slightest to the quality of the film?
Of course it doesn't.
But it does make me wonder why. They got all the other details of early 2005 just right. They played all the right pop songs. The cell phone models were spot on. There was even a People magazine cover of Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt splitting up.
So why make it look like a sporting event at night in February is taking place on the hottest day of the summer in the wrong time zone?
Come to think of it, that game would have come on around 10:38 a.m. here in Australia. On a day that would have been bright and hot because it was summer.
Maybe the director just confused Melbourne, Australia with Melbourne, Florida.
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