Restless Review

On form, Gus Van Sant makes truly transcendent American films, some of them experimental, some of them supremely mainstream. Some of them, though, fall in between, which is where we find Restless, a pasty homage to Hal Ashby’s 1971 black comedy Harold And Maude, in which a morbid young man (Henry Hopper, son of Dennis) doesn’t fall for an old lady but a cute teen with a tumour (Mia Wasikowska). The wistful music of Sufjan Stevens punctuates throughout, just as Elliott Smith’s did in Good Will Hunting, but though the film creates a convincing tension of opposites — kooky Wasikowska is the perfect foil to the hangdog, spit-of-his dad Hopper — the bittersweet outcome is pretty much as you’d expected and, shockingly for a Van Sant movie, isn’t subverted at all.