Declaration of War (**3/4)

Misleading titled, this French import nearly begins misleadingly too, with a montage scene straight from a romantic comedy. Actually, though, we first see a boy of five or so in a MRI machine. And then we see his parents, who are named Roméo and Juliette, meet. They have a boy, Adam. Not yet two, Adam gets sick. (Rarely does a toddler get so much screen time.) Relatives are informed. There are tears, but this is less of a tearjerker, all things considered, that one might have expected. The most notable segments are not the obvious ones—the diagnosis, the treatment decisions, and so on—but the ones in between, where the couple must go on living their lives.

The drama, cowritten by the two leads, Valérie Donzelli and Jérémie Elkaïm, and directed by Donzelli, is at its best in these small moments. (Donzelli and Elkaïm have played romantic partners in other films and have some chemistry.) Roméo and Juliette try to make each other laugh about their worrying too much. They try to understand each other’s different reactions to their situation. They smoke a lot. (It was the degree of smoking that made me suspect, correctly, that the movie was based on a true story.) Except for the smoking, I’d have liked the movie to be even more about these small moments. I don’t really trust those montage scenes in romantic comedies because they seem to be a substitute for actually showing why a couple are together, and I felt like that was true here. Without giving away what happens to either Adam or his parents, it also seemed odd that the story simply skips ahead and dispenses with both questions in a quick epilogue that is not necessarily implied by what has happened before. Additionally, the soundtrack music, which ranges from Vivaldi to Laurie Anderson, is jarring when it should have been intimate.

IMDb link

viewed 2/5/12 3:40 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/5/12  

My Sister’s Keeper (**3/4)

Conceived for the purpose of providing her older sister with donated blood marrow, an eleven-year-old (Abigail Breslin) sues to avoid having to give up one of her kidneys. Adapted from a novel by Jodi Picoult, it has the makings of a good courtroom drama, or at least a good Law and Order episode, but the emphasis is very much on the family dynamic. The legal stuff is confined to about 15 minutes of the movie. The medical stuff gets more attention and is woven into the rest of the movie. The parents are played by Cameron Diaz and Jason Patrick.

Director Nick Cassavetes and his cowriter, Jeremy Leven, are together responsible for what to my mind is one of the sappiest films I’ve seen in recent years, The Notebook, yet they actually alter (improve, I’d say) the book’s ending to something a little less sentimental, or at least less coincidental. It’s still purely an emotional story—the outcome finesses the ethical issues while providing the only plot twist. The first half relies too heavily on multi-character voiceovers to provide perspectives that would have better been shown than told. There were also at least one too many interludes with flat musical accompaniment. The flashback structure is used fairly well, providing the family story while not giving away the surprise. Unlike The Notebook, it’s a decent weeper that doesn’t feel manipulative.

IMDB link

viewed at Roxy and reviewed 7/7/09