Most critics like it, and the praise clusters on Frances McDormand’s Olive, with Richard Jenkins’s Henry close behind. Several single out the marriage between them, awkward and unglamorous and lasting, as the heart of the piece, and the adaptation is credited with keeping the novel’s shape across four hours without hurrying it. Lisa Cholodenko’s direction is praised for balance and restraint, and the tone, dry and sad and funny at the same moment, is admired almost everywhere.
The reservations concern pace and mood. The Guardian, the one mixed review, finds the pacing stagnant and the quantity of misery hard to take. Collider, otherwise warm, notes padding and a slow final stretch. Nobody faults the acting. The spread is fairly wide in score but narrow in substance: the doubters agree with the admirers about what is good here, and simply find it slow.