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There are also several structural problems with the Tomorrow Mourning. To begin with, Roger's entire storyline is incredibly weak and underdeveloped, especially when compared to the time and emotion spent on the other characters. Because his story was not well developed, there was no real connection to the character, and as a result, I felt no sympathy for him or his circumstances. I felt that of the six storylines, this one was the most awkward and (because of that and the long running time) needed to be cut. Secondly, there were several what I call "What the Hell?!" moments in the film: scenes or actions that come out of nowhere with no build-up or explanation. The first such moment is the Sheila/Lisa sex scene. Not only was it completely unnecessary, but it made it appear that Sheila's concern for Lisa was not genuine, but was more motivated by her desire for sex. Another example was when Roger's mother killed herself. Because the audience has never seen her before and knows nothing about her, there is no empathy for her, and her death (and Roger's resulting compounded grief) means very little. While I know that these "What the Hell?!" moments happen in real life, a film is different. A filmmaker needs the audience to believe in the world s/he has created. However, scenes/actions with no explanation or foreshadowing confuse the audience, jolting them out of the world of the movie, and breaking their suspension of disbelief.
But the biggest problem I had with the film was its portrayal of Christians. The tagline of the film says that "Pain does not discriminate", but it is clear in the movie that Christians do. With one very minor exception, all of the Christians are portrayed as judgemental, narrow-minded, perverted, self-centered, and/or disinterested. Kyle's father Joshua (a minister) is harsh, unforgiving, and judgemental to his family; he has never forgiven Sheila for her infidelity and curses, beats, and finally disowns Kyle when he announces he's gay. Joshua is visually compared to Jim Jones and Hitler, while Kyle is equated (literally) with Jesus. Sheila's initial compassion for Lisa is negated when she initates sex with her, thus making it appear that Sheila is using Lisa. Lisa is brutally beaten and raped by a street preacher who has come to "cast the demons" out of her. According to Drew, both his mother and his church are superficial and disinterested, and his disillusionment with them is what drives him to attempt suicide. Ester is criticized by Christians solely because of the way she dresses. When she attends a concert at Jacob's church, she's firmly "asked" by the youth pastor to leave because of her appearance. Later that night, Jacob offers to give her a ride home from the concert, but instead takes her to a hotel room and tries to rape her. The only Christian that is not portrayed in a negative light is the singer of the band at Jacob's church. He takes a genuine, non-sexual, non-judgmental interest in Ester, telling her that he didn't agree with what the youth pastor told her, and that people shouldn't judge her by her appearance. However, he is only on screen for less than 5 minutes, so this does nothing to counteract the overwhelmingly negative depiction of Christians within this 3-hour film.
By making nearly all of the unlikeable characters Christians, the filmmaker has made a broad, sweeping generalization that ends up overpowering the actual message he's trying to convey. It's never a good idea to have all of the negative (or "bad") characters in a story belong to the same religious, racial/ethnic, sexual, geographical, or gender group. Doing so makes the story too heavy-handed, while the characters become one- or two-dimensional stereotypes. Good storytelling will, in some way, reflect an aspect of real life; and in real life, not all Christians, blacks, Jews, gays, or whatever are bad people. While most of the stories in this film were based on actual events from the director's life, these events needed to be either separated into separate projects or distilled down into one or two discreet stories due to the magnifying nature of film. This obsessive compulsion with Christians throughout the majority of the film ends up completely overwhelming the real story that the director intended to tell, which is of six different people's struggles with pain.
Visual Look
There are two main kinds of shots utilized in this film: stationary and handheld. The stationary shots are fine, with minimal camera movement and very little shake. However, the handheld shots are extremely shaky, especially during dialogue scenes. Rather than cutting between the two chraracters in a scene, the camera turns from one person to the other; but it's not a clean side-to-side pan. Because it's done with a handheld, the motion is unstable, to the point of being disorienting and nauseating. (Think Bourne Supremacy, but not as fast.) The only reason for this kind of camerawork that I could think of was that it was representative of the instability of the characters' lives. If that was the case, there are much better ways to showcase that.
The lighting quality was all over the board. In some scenes, it was oversaturated and overexposed, with blown-out whites. In other scenes, it was dark and very grainy, as if almost no auxiliary lighting was used. Also, the coloration varied greatly; some scenes had warm, earthy tones to them, while others were very noticeably blue. Some films, such as Traffic, use this contrasting coloration quality to differentiate between multiple storylines. However, the lighting/color quality is not consistent within the same story. For example, several scenes in Roger's story have a very cool, blue tone to them; but that look is not carried consistently throughout his thread. Likewise, some of Drew's scenes are grainy and poorly lit; this would be acceptable if that was "the look" for his story, but many scenes are well-lit. Such disparities with lighting and color quality made it difficult to tell who some of the characters were in the film.
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