It's always difficult to portray mental illness but the mixture of comedy and violence in this movie totally confused the issue.

Virginia is an interesting movie with a good cast of characters. Jennifer Connelly carried each of her scenes with a true grasp of her character. Jennifer plays Virginia an unwed and mentally ill mother to a teenage son named Emmett, and mistress to Sheriff Richard Tipton, played by Ed Harris. Sheriff Tipton is a married Mormon who has aspiration of becoming Governor in the upcoming election.

Sheriff Richard Tipton likes his extra marital sex kinky which Virginia is more than willing to oblige but in return she expects Sheriff Tipton to express his true love to her by leaving his trusting wife played by Amy Madigan. Sheriff Tipton wants his extra marital affair to remain a secret between the two of them so that he can keep up his charade as a good Mormon family man.

What he does not know is that Virginia's son Emmett wants to marry the Sheriiff's only daughter Jessie, played by Emma Roberts. When he finds the two teenagers are getting too close, he threatens young Emmett to stay away from his family and he decides to break off his long standing sexual relationship with Virginia, and to cut her off from his weekly cash contributions.

With the financial support stopped Virginia wants to help pay for her son's Emmett wedding to Jessie so she attempts to rob a bank without success. Poor Virginia is so distraught that she has no cash coming in and no way of helping her son Emmett out that she chooses to believe she is pregnant with Sheriff Tipton's baby by faking it and telling anyone that will listen that the (pretend) baby is Sheriff Tipton's.

The superb actor Toby Jones plays Max a cross dressing amusement park owner who takes a liking to Emmett and offers him a job at one of his restaurants on the amusement grounds. Without spoiling the ending suffice to say, between Max, Emmett, Virginia, Mrs Tipton, and Sheriff Tipton there is a lot of love and confusion.

Virginia and Ed Harris are well worth watching. Their on screen chemistry works and their characters are very believable. The ending supports the movie well and I for one was not disappointed in the way the movie ends.

"Dear Lord please let each of us come out of this in one piece." Virginia (Connelly) is a single mother raising her teen son in a small town. She is not sure of who the father is but she has been having an affair with the local married sheriff (Harris) for almost 20 years and wants it to be his. When he announces his run for state senate things begin to get tricky. This is a very hard movie to explain there seems to be a lot of sub plots going on but it is not hard to keep up with them. Connelly plays the character perfect and while she is psychologically disturbed it is not over the top at all and very believable. I enjoyed this but to me this is another example of a movie's cast being better then the movie. This is still very much worth watching and is one of the better indie movies to come out in a long time it is still a little slow. This movie is very emotional though and really runs you through as many as it can before the ending which is great. Overall, great acting really helps this movie out and this is a good movie that is worth watching but not really one you can see over and over. Amanda liked it more then I did but I give it a B.