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What's Wrong With Virginia

What's Wrong With Virginia

Dustin Lance Black

  • Country: USA
  • Year: 2010
  • Language: English
  • Producer: Christine Vachon, Hopwood DePree XIV, Scott J. Brooks
  • Executive Producer: Gus Van Sant, Yeardley Smith, Jay Froberg, Greg Suess
  • Screenplay: Dustin Lance Black
  • Runtime: 116
  • Programmes:

Jennifer Connelly stars as Virginia, a charming yet mentally ill mother whose greatest love is her protector and illegitimate son, Emmett (Harrison Gilbertson). Richard Tipton (Ed Harris), the local married Mormon sheriff, who is running for public office, might very well be Emmett’s father. This boardwalk town’s peculiar secrets are threatened when Virginia’s son begins a romantic relationship with Tipton’s daughter (Emma Roberts) sending mother and son on a mad dash to seize their own brand of the American Dream – guns blazing.

screening times

    • Wednesday September 15
    • 6:00:00 PM
    • VISA SCREENING ROOM (ELGIN)
    • Thursday September 16
    • 2:30:00 PM
    • VISA SCREENING ROOM (ELGIN)

Note: indicates Premium Screening.

official description

When Dustin Lance Black won his Academy Award® for writing Gus Van Sant’s Milk, he noted that he grew up in a conservative Mormon home in San Antonio, Texas. The distance between that world and the sensibility from which he now writes may look vast, but a good storyteller can always bridge opposites. What’s Wrong With Virginia marks the directorial debut of this gifted writer, synthesizing small town Christian America with the sexual undercurrents that often lay buried there, all filtered through an acutely cinematic vision.

Jennifer Connelly is Virginia. Delicate and troubled, she has survived in her tourist town, despite hints of mental illness, thanks to her beauty and her wonderfully irrational optimism. An affair with Sheriff Tipton (Ed Harris) has dragged on for years with no resolution, but Virginia lives in hope. She’s been willing to indulge both the sheriff’s bedroom prayer-sessions and his secret taste for fetish sex, but when he announces his plan to run for the state senate, their affair runs the risk of becoming a political liability.

Virginia’s teenaged son Emmett (Harrison Gilbertson) isn’t faring as well as his mother. Perpetually embarrassed by her, he now seeks contact with the father he never knew. Using genetics lessons half-learned in science class, he begins searching the town for his paternal match. Virginia takes a similar opportunity to reinvent her reality. Rejecting a medical diagnosis she doesn’t like, she decides instead that she is pregnant. When her body fails to cooperate, she stuffs pantyhose to create a bulge and announces to everyone who will listen, “I'm pregnant with Sheriff Tipton's baby.”

Black lets the strangeness unfold without judgment. Drawing on shades of David Lynch and Todd Haynes (and Douglas Sirk before him), he descends into the world of his characters on their lyrical, sometimes lurid terms. The effect is intoxicating.

Cameron Bailey

director bio

Dustin Lance Black was born in San Antonio, Texas and graduated from UCLA’s School of Film, Theater and Television. His screenwriting and directing credits include The Journey of Jared Price (00) and the short film Something Close to Heaven (00). He has won two Writers Guild of America awards for his work on the television show Big Love, and an Academy Award® for writing Gus Van Sant’s Milk (08). What’s Wrong With Virginia (10) is his first feature as writer-director.

full credits

Principal Cast: Jennifer Connelly, Ed Harris, Emma Roberts, Harrison Gilbertson, Amy Madigan
Producer: Christine Vachon, Hopwood DePree XIV, Scott J. Brooks
Executive Producer: Gus Van Sant, Yeardley Smith, Jay Froberg, Greg Suess
Cinematographer: Eric Alan Edwards
Editor: John David Allen
Sound: Leslie Shatz
Music: Nick Urata
Production Designer: Laura Fox

Canadian Distributor: eOne Films  
International Sales Agent: Inferno International
Production Company: TicTock Studios
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