Anthony LaPaglia’s Leo Waters is a self-satisfied architect whose little world starts to fall apart when a housing project he designed comes under siege by its residents. Based on a play by Scotland’s David Greig (who collaborated with director Matt Tauber on the screenplay), the film has been transplanted to Chicago — which makes sense given its racial politics, except that the politics are trite. Both LaPaglia and Viola Davis as the resident agitating for the project’s destruction give lovely performances, but they can’t transcend the cliché’d writing. Further bogging down the story are Leo’s wife and kids, who suffer through their own angsty story lines — I think I’m gay, I’m a bored suburban housewife, etc. This is a film about liberal white guilt, and that’s a limited subject, even to this liberal white critic.
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