Khoi Vinh’s review published on Letterboxd:
It’s hard to watch this and not feel touched by the warmth of Robin Williams’s careful, tender performance, and to be reminded of his sad passing. It’s Willaims’s genial presence that lifts this coming of age story beyond its rather pro forma, prestige-fare basics. Unfortunately there’s relatively little of Williams in this movie. Instead we spend the vast majority of the time with a cadre of not particularly memorable preppies and their generic yearnings and anxieties. The tragedy that befalls one of them in the third act feels like an extension of that same blankness; it’s somehow both unexpected because it’s unearned and unsurprising because it’s so clichéd.
For all its lack of imagination though, I have to admit that this movie hits at least some of the marks that audiences expect it to. It’s beautifully shot and makes you feel good about yourself for identifying with the protagonists and also makes you wistful for a lost time that you probably never even remotely experienced firsthand. That reliability amplifies the one and only scene that truly lives up to the carpe diem potential that it extols so fervently: about midway through, Williams’s character draws an unexpectedly emotional outpouring of poetry from a young Ethan Hawke. It’s raw and surprisingly convincing and also sadly isolated in its brilliance.
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