Imagine having a camera trained on you for an entire day. What would it capture? In the age of reality television it's refreshing to see a movie depicting the intricate oddities of a group of "normal" suburban people in their own neighborhood environment. On any given day, I can list a number of funny, strange, and tragic things that happen right in my own backyard, so for a film to highlight this and do such a superb job at drawing me in, I was very impressed.

As with all similar films that follow a group of main characters, it's easy to get lost, but I'll try to provide a guide. Walter is the main character, the first one we meet. He hates the world and most of the people in it after suffering the tragic death of his son and subsequent loss of his wife and his career. He spends most of the movie sitting in his living room yelling at the television or radio. He also spends the entire day trying to kill himself, but his ineptitude prevents him from achieving this every time, and it's both humorous and tragic. Another main character is an out-of-work alcoholic father down the street who spends his time slinging ethnic slurs and degrading his wife and two kids. His family walks on eggshells around him, trying not to upset him, except for his young son who seems wise beyond his years. The son is introspective and intelligent, spending most of his time reading and contemplating life, and his father berates him for being a "sissy" on more than one occasion. The teenage daughter quits school in order to take on a job babysitting for the autistic son of a local Asian family.

She is supposed to leave for a church retreat this weekend, but through a series of unfortunate circumstances, she finds herself literally trapped in the backyard, having fallen and unable to call for help, she waits all day for someone to rescue her. These characters are quirky in the way that "normal" people are quirky in ways that they would never admit to anyone. All of the complex familial and neighborly relations come to a head on this one day when circumstances force them to take a look at themselves and do a frank assessment of what their lives have become. Walter's sister hires a maid to come clean his house (much to his chagrin) and he ends up learning some unexpected things from her. The lonely woman whose closest relationship is her dog invites a fortune teller into her home and gets a reading that she never expected. The lonely young wife attempts to have an affair, and circumstances lead both to the discovery of her mother in law in the backyard and some surprising revelations about herself as well.

The bullying father crosses the line with his abuse, forcing his wife to stand up to him, and his teenage daughter, who started out mocking her autistic charge, ends up getting a peek into his world that shocks her. These are the very banal situations and people that Walter claims to hate for most of the movie, because the live their lives and don't notice the world around them or think about their actions. But since Walter is really the only one who thinks about his own actions at ALL for most of the movie, he ends up obsessing about his life and his mistakes and almost losing everything he may have left in the process. The film makes the statement that there has to be a line drawn between not examining your life at all and obsessing about your life to the point where you drown in a sea of regret. The way each of these characters discovers that line is a joy to see, even as it flows from tragedy and sorrow (after all, the full title of the movie is "Joyful Partaking...in the Sorrows of Life").

Like any low-budget movie this one suffers from some subpar acting resulting in my least favorite aspect of movies: wooden line delivery. But there's not too much of it, so I gritted my teeth when it happened and stuck it out. The movie is also a tad bit too long in the middle, and since it features several main characters, there's always one or two characters you don't really like or care about so you feel less of a connection with their stories. Luckily they don't get too much screen time.

At the end, when the bullying father feels guilty for how he's treated his young son and he goes into his son's room to try and say something positive, he notices a poster of Socrates on the wall and they have the following exchange. Dad: "'The unexamined life is not worth living'? What the hell does that mean?" Son: "Don't worry. They killed him for it." It's a great moment highlighting the possible ramifications of thinking too much about one's life and mistakes, which is what befalls our main character. Plus it's a wonderful commentary on what we've just watched and a great, witty way to sum up the themes of the movie. Well done.

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