Patang (*3/4)

In the heart of old (crowded) Ahmedabad, western India’s largest city, a family gathers on the eve of the city’s annual kite-flying festival. Jayesh, a successful businessman in Delhi, has traveled 500 miles with his college-age daughter to revisit his former home. And…that’s all. It takes over an hour for anything truly dramatic to happen, and even then it would be stretching to call it a plot, but then it’s over in any case. The colorful photography is something to look at, though.

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Viewed at Ritz 5 11/1/11 7:50 pm [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 11/1/11

Rachel Getting Married (***1/4)

Imagine a middle-class woman from a mildly bohemian family hiring a good videographer or two to film her family on the weekend of her wedding. Imagine also that her sister has just gotten out of rehab—again—and arrived just before the rehearsal dinner. And imagine that, instead of excising all the heavy family drama, they hire an editor to make a really good home movie with everything left in. Consider that a recommendation or warning, as the case may be. Director Jonathan Demme, best known for slick works like Philadelphia and The Silence of the Lambs, here takes a less-polished approach (perhaps influenced by recent documentaries he’s made), working from a script by Jenny Lumet.

The sisters are played by Rosemary Dewitt (Rachel) and Anne Hathaway (troubled Kym). They have a love-hate relationship magnified by past tragedy, though it takes a bit of time to get to that. Hathaway, who started out as a princess with a diary and played angel in The Devil Wears Prada, curdles her nervous energy into a character who is not sweet at all, but is always the center of attention. Even her expressions of guilt seem narcissistic.

There are a lot more characters, and not everything revolves around the sister-sister dynamic. Just a in like a real wedding video, there are a lot of people you won’t get to know well but who all get to say something. In medium-size roles are Debra Winger, as the divorced mother of the bride and Bill Irwin, the avuncular dad. The groom’s extended family are all there, too. (They’re black, but the only significance that’s given is in adding to the multicultural-ness of the quasi-hippie, quasi-Hindu wedding, held at the familt home in Connecticut.) Dewitt may give the best performance.

You probably don’t have a family like the one in this movie, at least I don’t, but the dynamic of their conflict may yet seem familiar. Some of the best scenes perfectly capture the feel of arguments that repeat themselves and never seem to resolve. I’ve never known a family like this, but still felt like it was a real family. Though not quite endearing, even Kym becomes understandable.

It’s not all high drama. There are the musical interludes. (The movie has no score as such, but multiple performances by the musician characters; unsurprisingly, the happy couple favor world music over Top 40. ) And there are some funny parts, too. Lumet apparently lifted one sequence, a dishwasher-loading contest, from an incident involving her dad (director Sidney) and Bob Fosse. Like several other scenes in the movie, including much of the last ten minutes, it could have been edited out of the film without anything not making sense. And no doubt some people will come away from the movie thinking that a lot of it should have been edited out. And that they could’ve done without all of the handheld cameras, which Demme actually gave to the cast to film with. For better or worse, this is easily the most naturalistic feature of 2008.

I will say forthrightly that some people will be put off, or bored, by the narrative detours, unpolished camera work, and angsty drama that provides only an uneasy catharsis. While I occasionally grew impatient with the kitchen-sink structure, the movie’s best scenes are gut-wrenching, and the organic wholeness of Demme’s approach makes it one of the more original movies of the year.

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viewed 11/6/08 at Ritz 5; reviewed 1/22/09

Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins (**3/4)

Martin Lawrence, less crude than usual, stars as a talk-show host (think Jerry Springer) who brings his controlling fiancée, a Survivor-winning fitness freak, home for his parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. It’s ultra-individualism (the fiancée) versus family values, and good nutrition versus obesity, and guess who wins? Yes, it’s rather reductive and predictable, but some funny moments and a cohesive story save this comedy from the writer-director of 1999’s The Best Man. The large cast includes James Earl Jones as the hard-headed patriarch, Mo'nique as the sassy sister, Michael Clarke Duncan as the brother, and Cedric the Entertainer as Roscoe’s cousin who is his once and future rival for the hometown sweetheart.

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viewed 2/9/08; reviewed 2/14/08

Dan in Real Life (**1/2)

This is a movie about love at first sight. The victim, Dan, is an advice columnist, widower, and father of three girls (Steve Carrell), and the object of his adoration is a free spirit (Juliette Binoche) he meets in a bookstore in a fashion that probably can only happen in a screenplay. (No matter how charmed a woman is by a man, she will not scoop up both a Pablo Neruda poetry volume and “Everybody Poops” and buy both.) The setting is a New England family reunion, and the conflict arises when Dan learns that he is smitten with his brother’s (Dane Cook) girlfriend. Through pancake breakfasts and group jazz-ercise and charades, Dan is tormented, but in a sort of light-comedy way rather than one that will make the audience feel truly sad for him. Similarly played is the angst of the daughters, the oldest of whom Dan does not wish to drive, and the second oldest of whom he does not wish to date. The youngest, a fourth grader, remains loyal as the others resent him, though in a way that suggests it will all pass. (As the middle daughter, Brittany Robertson lends believability to her teen heartsickness, though.)

Light on plot, only occasionally corny, the movie pleasantly winds down a road whose end is only too clear. The delicately buoyant score and songs by Sondre Lerche give the film a gentle, wistful feel. I only wish there was something more than surface appeal. One of the hardest things to do really well, I think, is to credibly show people connecting. Director-writer Peter Hedges, who previously made the pretty-good indie hit Pieces of April, accomplishes this largely with a montage scene. Yet the entire film revolves around the viewer being convinced that, via an afternoon of conversation, Dan cannot forget this woman who, it is implied, is the first he’s been interested in since his wife died.

Maybe it’s me, but it would have given the movie some dramatic heft if there’d been a little more pathos to the story. Even the end, which does not involve the brothers deciding to share, is too easy, like you can have a plot like this without anyone getting truly hurt. (The losing brother gets what I call the consolation girlfriend, an annoyingly overused plot device used to avoid having the audience feel bad for or about any of the characters. See just about any Hollywood movie involving a romantic rivalry, unless one of the rivals is a total jerk.) I guess you’d call this a feel-good picture, but it would have been better had Hedges let us feel a little sadness too.

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reviewed 10/27/07

Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Family Reunion (**3/4)

Perry’s comic “mad black housewife” returns, but mixed in with a romance and melodrama involving two of her nieces. The plot is trite but the characters are pretty good.

Madea was the title character of the critically lambasted but popular Diary of a Mad Black Housewife. As played by writer-director Perry in drag, she’s the same sort of comical character as Momma in the Big Momma’s House movies, except without an alter ego. She’s feisty but supposedly wise, although her solution to most problems seems to involve whacking somebody upside the head. But she—and her elderly brother, also played by Perry—are only in about a third of the movie. The other two thirds are taken up by her nieces, and these stories are straight soap opera, for better and worse. There’s the younger daughter (Rochelle Aytes), afraid to escape a fiancé (Blair Underwood) who beats her, and her older sister (a convincing Lisa Arrindell Anderson), afraid to believe that the ridiculously handsome bus driver who asks her out could be a nice guy.

The mixture of pathos and very broad comedy is mildly jarring. Judging by the guffaws I heard during the Madea parts, I probably thought a little less of the humor than some. The plotting is ordinary. But there were some interesting things, things you don’t see too often in typical movies. (Read: movies where white people have speaking parts.) For example, you probably don’t see an older woman beating a child’s behind, not played for laughs, anyway. You don’t see the romantic lead tell his date that he’s a Christian, or her telling him she’s staying celibate until marriage (and meaning it). You don’t see Cicely Tyson make an interminably weird speech about how the young’uns have forgotten family and black men need to be strong. Finally, you don’t get to see what must be the tackiest wedding since the Britney Spears-Jason Alexander Vegas quickie.

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posted 9/11/13