
            This film is one of the finest portrayals of mental illness I have seen. Being a therapist myself, I know the stigma that comes with a family member being diagnosed with schizophrenia and this film does the struggle great justice.The film follows the Marino family, who live in South Florida. Joe Panteliano plays John, the father, a struggling working class man whose wife Mary (played beautifully by Marsha Gay Harden) has been diagnosed with schziophrenia. They have a child named Chris who is struggling to find his own identity while dealing with his mother's troubling illness.In the beginning of the film, we see Mary's attempts to connect with Chris through her artwork and his disappointment that she continues to paint the same scene over and over, a beach with a lighthouse. We come to discover through the movie that Mary holds onto this memory because it is one of the last times she was able to really be a mother to Chris. Mary, like many people with mental illness, believes she does not need her medication and stops taking it. Mary decompensates one night during a thunderstorm and becomes very paranoid and ends up accidentally hurting Chris. Mary is then taken to a hospital, where she stays for the remainder of the film.Once Mary is hospitalized, the film turns its focus to John and Chris, both trying to hold together their family and both failing to do so. John begins building a sailboat in the backyard, both to distract himself and to find comfort in an activity that he and Mary used to enjoy. Chris turns to sewing t-shirts for his friends, and begins to make money doing so. All the while, son and father are not connecting. Mary's occasional visits home are disasterous and the family nearly breaks apart when Chris tries to destroy the boat John has been working on, in anger. In addition, John loses his job at the company he has worked for for 15 years and is now completely on his own.John finally realizes that he is all his son has and makes an effort to connect with him, through fixing the boat. Chris uses the canvases from his mother's paintings to patch the sail (hence the title) and the two finally get to sail the boat together. The father and son even pass his ex-boss and his bratty son in their fancy speedboat which is stuck without gas. Finally, John gets to fulfill a promise he made to Mary and take her on the boat, even if it is just on a trailer around the hospital.
    

Julie Upton

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