Sorry to bump this, but I caught this movie on one of the movie channels a couple nights ago and I thought it was an amazing film.
The one thing that I was torn about was how I felt about Ronnie's character. Some scenes, like when he is talking to his mom about placing an ad in the paper, made me feel like he was a normal, healthy person. But other scenes, like the pool scene and the car scene, made me feel disgust and sorry for him.
I do think however that the point of these scenes was to show that he really was mentally hill but he never received the help he needed.