Review: More bleak comedy than black, ‘The Estate’ is not worth your time (or Toni Collette’s)
The first thing that should spring to mind when you look at The Estate is a John Cusack movie. But that’s not entirely fair. If you remember the first Toni Collette picture, then you’ll recall that she did a lot of John Cusack–ish business in his name.
But Collette has other talents; she is funny at other times. But so are her co-stars, and The Estate might be best described as a sort of black comedy.
The plot goes like this: In the mid-’70s, when Collette was a child, her housekeeper moved to New Hampshire to live with her father, and things were never the same between them. While her father was involved in what would eventually become a love triangle with her mother’s lover, she’d be around but on her own, alone, bored, writing poetry. This left her all by herself for the first time in her life, so it was an awful time.
Eventually her father moved on and Collette moved in to the guest room where she began smoking a lot of pot, and writing poetry. And her poems changed in their tone.
Later, her mother and her lover would be murdered. Collette would be a suspect for the killings and, because she was a poet, would be put on trial for murder. It would be a huge surprise and shock for the entire town (Collette grew up in Manchester, one of the towns near the crime scenes). However, she would eventually win that trial.
And then she would kill the person who took her from her parents and moved away from her mother (they’d been lovers, and then had sex on the roof, where her mother lived). She would have spent the ’80s at various points, before being released on her own recognizance
