The acting was OK. It's refreshing to see the protagonist with his 'boy body' before he found steroids in 'American Psycho'! Now he just looks like everybody else.This story is not original. The theme has been explored a thousand times in a thousand films that were better. I hate movies portraying other times. It's always impossible to 'recreate an era'! When will Hollywood learn that? The mood, the people, the mores are gone forever. Everyone wants innocence back but you cannot erase the smugness and skepticism of now. It just creeps through everything we do. This is at best someone's dream of what some 1960s young people thought and discovered. I notice that nobody ever tells stories about working class people anymore. The working class never had the luxury of these choices. There was no question about life--it was just survival. One went to school if one got loans or scholarships or worked his way through. One went to war if one was drafted. One went to factory if one was below average. One got married or lived with parents. The act of getting a license to drive or see a movie was special. You took nothing for granted. Your parents didn't adore you; they put up with you. You were most likely an accident. You rarely questioned anything because what you had was such a struggle to obtain and the daily chore of trying to keep it was huge. Just once, I'd like to see this investigated in film. It's a reminder that the film industry is owned/run by wealthy people of the Mideast faith and they delight in reflections of themselves only.

Every person, once in a while, during his adolescent years, dreams of doing something different- something more meaningful. But then he grows up and makes the choices- mostly ending up on paths that many had taken before him and many will take after him. While traveling on that path of course, he often stops and wonders whether he made the right decision- is this the right path for him. Metroland beautifully explores this state of mind when a person is half way down the road and wondering whether the decision he took was right or whether he should really become that rebel he always dreamed of becoming. The fact that this movie (made in nineties) is shot in the context of seventies emphasizes this point even further- the situation doesn't change with the decade- or with the ages. The acting is brilliant with Christian Bale on the top. The two leading ladies are OK though not too impressive.The direction is the one that truly steals the show. The director is able to create the effect of the viewer actually being part of the journey with the protagonist, where he starts from the feeling of what if and ending up in the awakening. A must watch for anyone past there 20s and feeling settled in their life.

"everybody out there knows how I feel about the brilliant Emily Watson" Do they? Are you the most famous man in the world, or something? Perhaps you are in fact God, a status belied by your appalling typing skills. Or else you suffer from an unparalled case of egotism, in which case, you should consider therapy as a matter of some urgency.I liked this film. It's the first of Bale's adult acting career. His portrayal of a man who is no longer young, yet not quite middle-aged, is intelligent and textured. Emily Watson delivers a subtly understated and beguiling performance as his wife. As a discussion of the process of growing older, and the changing relationships and sense of loss that this entails, Metroland is an absorbing and entertaining film.

The main character in Metroland embodies the crisis that every one of us has already or will probably go through. "Have we made the right choices in our lives to make ourselves happy?".The movie portrays this character's search for the answers through flashbacks to his past as well as new events that are occurring in his present. The two paths that he could have taken were shown. He begins questioning if he had made the right choice with his current life. A life which he thought he would never want when he was younger and rebellious. The "9 to 5" job that we, or at least some of us, have all dreaded in fear of the death of our own creativity and individualism. The main male character basically is the imperfect hero with imperfect thoughts, much akin to the "hero" that we can hope to be at this day and age. The last line in the movie, "If not now, then, never." is a line we always hear but take its meaning for granted. Truly, if happiness is not found in the moment..in the "now"..then, where else can it ever be?