White Palms

Not really what I was expecting based on other reviews. This film was short on a lot of things - including dialogue, continuity, and strangely enough, gymnastics footage. While the story was billed as the journey of a male gymnast from eastern Europe in the Communist era coming to Canada for a role as a coach, the threads quickly get lost in the early prolonged flashback to the not-so-nice place where he grew up. And the story never really comes back together after that. While the present and the past are revealed almost in parallel, the intercutting often does not make sense, and a substantial gap remains in the story - there is a 16-year period in his life that never really gets explained, and so the story remains unfulfilling. The film does have a few things going for it, including a great scene where the past mixed with the present makes for some edge-of-the-seat minutes, and the film's star makes for some wonderful eye candy. However, it never gets around to telling the entire story, and ends up feeling incomplete. The appearance of the Canadian gymnast is actually a bit of a distraction for me, mostly because I was hoping to see some excellent gymnastics routines but was disappointed. Some sports movies tend to show too much of the sport and competition, but this one showed too little to be satisfying, especially when the story and visual elements of the film were also lacking.