Bright Days Ahead (***)

It may occur to you that this French film’s take on infidelity is very French. Fanny Ardant, who reminded me of Rene Russo, plays Caroline, the adulterous one here, a prematurely retired dentist who takes up with a thirtysomething computer instructor (Laurent Lafitte) at Bright Days Ahead, a kind of activity center that gives seniors a chance to brush up on acting, pottery, and ping-pong. It seems that Julien, the instructor, is having trouble with his teeth, and before long they’ve filled each other’s cavities. Caroline’s husband (Patrick Chesnais) seems nice enough, but Caroline is in need of something new in her life.


Director Marion Vernoux casts no implied moral judgments on her characters, presenting Caroline’s infidelity, and Julien’s own casual attitude (he has other lovers; she accepts that, mostly), without elaborate justifications. Emphasizing temperament over dramatic tension, she deals with the emotional fallout from the affair in a rather tidy way, quite the opposite of, for example, the American thriller Unfaithful. The movie’s setting in the Calais area (northern France) sort of suits the film; the area lacks the ornate architecture of Paris or the lushness of the south. Its plainness matches these characters who, notwithstanding their deceptiveness, display a minimum of guile.

Most evidently, it’s a role Ardant can sink her teeth into, and she’s particularly effective in the film’s most flirtatious scenes. Surprises do not abound here, but that may be enough of a reason to watch.

IMDb link


viewed 4/23/12 7:30 pm at Gershman Y [PFS screening]

August: Osage County (***1/2)

This is one of those stories about dysfunctional families coming together that usually take place over a Thanksgiving weekend or at Christmas. In this case, it’s a disappearance, but the elements are the same. Start with the mother, whose pain-pill dependence and freewheeling tongue provide another scenery-chewing role for Meryl Streep. Her husband (Sam Shepard) is a onetime poet who, oddly provides the opening narration, quoting T. S. Eliot, then goes missing. Soon after, the daughters show up. Ivy (Julianne Nicholson), the caretaker, has never left Oklahoma. Flighty Karen, the youngest, chattiest, and cheeriest, comes from Florida with her fiancé (Dermot Mulroney). Barbara (Julia Roberts), the eldest, is the one most resentful of, but most like, her mother. She brings her estranged husband (Ewan McGregor) and her daughter (Abigail Breslin). If we knew the future, she tells the 14-year-old , “we’d never want get up in the morning.”

The rich dialogue is among the pleasures of this adaptation of the Tracy Letts play; Letts himself provides the script, and it retains a certain play-like quality and structure, although a few scenes are set outdoors. This means lots of dialogue, well-crafted characters, and a lot of confrontational scenes, any of which, in some other movie, might be the centerpiece scene. Many of these are funny, which means the heavy themes — addiction, alcoholism, adultery, to take just the letter A — never seem ponderous. Instead, they provide just the right mixture of pathos and juicy revelation.

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viewed 1/19/14 1:00 pm at AMC Marple; posted 1/22/14

Hello, I Must Be Going (***1/2)

Back in 1994, Melanie Lynskey got her first part, in Peter Jackson’s psychological drama Heavenly Creatures. While her costar went on to Titanic and Oscar nominations, the New Zealnd-born actress settled for smaller parts and television guest spots. But I noticed her in last year’s Win Win, and her wide-ranging performance as newly divorced 35-year-old Amy should vastly upgrade her future roles. As the film begins, she’s moved into her parents’ (Blythe Danner, John Rubinstein) suburban New York house, slept late, and stayed in. Not a good way to meet a man, but when 19-year-old Jeremy (Christopher Abbott) pays a visit with his parents, they begin a furtive affair.

Despite the age difference, it makes sense in a way, since both of them are at a similar stage in life. The movie’s title comes not from the Phil Collins album, but from a Groucho Marx line, so it makes sense that the story is told with humor as well as feeling. I kind of expected the scene where the two lovers are caught in an awkward position, but it was still one of the funnier such scenes. The parent-child dynamic is captured with more intricacy than the romantic one; Mom is the one more prone to push her Amy to do something with herself, but as things turn out, her relationship with each of them changes, and so does she.


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viewed 9/17/12 7:30 pm at World Café Live and reviewed 9/20/12

Don’t Look Down (**3/4)

Sensuality reigns in this Argentine tale of a stilt-walking, sleepwalking young man whose chance meeting with a slightly older woman of the world changes his life. Or at least his sex life. As the above description suggests, there are a few quirks in both the story and the young man, who thinks his recently deceased father is writing messages in his diary while he sleeps. Death and sex are significant themes, mixing in a way I didn’t quite grasp. However, sex predominates, as the Spanish señorita teaches the young man how to thrust 81 times without climaxing, not to mention such positions as the “Monkey Coiling Around a Tree.” That this Jean Brodie of copulation is played by lovely Antonella Costa helps, since she’s naked in half of her scenes. (Fairly, lead Leandro Stivelman also reveals “Marlon,” the nickname his appendage is given—yes, after Brando—in the movie.) Undoubtedly, this is a cut above the late-night pay cable flicks it comes close to resembling at times. But classy eroticism, light comic touches, and impressive visuals (not merely the sex, but the stilt-walking) don’t completely make up for the lack of any substantial plot.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz East 2 (Philadelphia Film Festival) and reviewed 4/6/09

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (**3/4)

Curious is Benjamin (Brad Pitt) because Benjamin ages backward. Screenwriter Eric Roth (Munich, The Good Shepherd, Ali) and director David Fincher (Zodiac, Panic Room, Fight Club) borrow this idea—and almost nothing else—from the identically titled F. Scott Fitzgerald story. Whereas Fitzgerald’s “Curious” is just that, a curious trifle, the film tries to be two things: a philosophical work, told in flashback excerpts of an old woman’s diary, and a love story of longing and separation.

Benjamin is born in New Orleans at the end of the Great War. In a concession to physical reality, he is baby-size and unlearned, but with the face, and arthritis, of an old man. Taken in by a black caregiver (Taraji P. Henson) at a nursing home, he grows larger, but not, seemingly, older. (Despite this setting and time period, racial themes are not prominent.) Time marches on, but Benjamin only grows more vigorous. Partly isolated from others by his condition, he forms mostly brief relationships. Only with his (adoptive) mother and the granddaughter of one of the nursing home residents is there a longer-lasting bond. (Fincher manages to depict the friendship of the “old man” and the little girl without it seeming creepy.) Eventually, Benjamin leaves New Orleans on a tugboat.

Except for some sexual frankness, the movie feels old-fashioned and timeless, which may be appealing. It’s beautifully shot and scored (by Alexandre Desplat). The make-up effects combine with Pitt’s elegant performance to make you forget he’s a movie star, or that the plot is outlandish. (However, I never quite understood why Benjamin assumes that he’ll regress into childishness and lose his adult memories to match his appearance. Given the way he starts out, couldn’t he as easily just look childish? I suppose the answer is that that outcome would seem more comic than poignant, as indeed the reverse situation is in the beginning, but it bothered me just the same.)

Having noticed that screenwriter Roth also wrote Forrest Gump, I realize that the two movies have a lot in common, structurally. Although comedy was more prominent in Gump, both movies feature the life stories of their central characters, and romances in which the strangeness of the hero creates a challenge. Despite this, I liked Gump a lot better. For all of the loveliness of this one, I felt unconnected to the story, and two reasons suggest themselves. The first is that, notwithstanding Pitt’s performance, Benjamin is not that memorable a character. Gump annoyed some people, true, but Button won’t annoy anyone because his only major characteristics are a certain reserved politeness, and his love for the girl, played as an adult by Cate Blanchett. Which brings up the other reason I didn’t love the movie. Blanchett is another fine performer, and her role has more personality to it, but when we first see her, I could not connect this hard-edged ballet dancer to the sweet child first encountered. There is too much separation in time and in character. And so I remained unconvinced, or maybe just unmoved, by the placid man’s reawakened ardor. I actually found Benjamin’s other romance, with an unhappily married Englishwoman (Tilda Swinton), a more compelling storyline, but it’s a much smaller part of the movie.

I’m not saying there was no poignancy at all in the way these two people can love but not grow old together, or in the way that the movie reminds us of how our connections with other people make us human. But I preferred the warmer tone of Gump, where the female lead is in some way like Blanchett’s—hard, but in a way that makes it easier to see the tenderness within. In fact, a more recent movie, Slumdog Millionaire, tells a very similar romantic tale, wherein the hero tries to reconnect with his childhood friend, now a toughened-up young woman. There too, I rooted harder for the couple than here. This is clearly a well-crafted movie, and so I know some people are going to like it a lot. But in my case, it just seems like an overlong curiosity.

IMDB link

viewed 12/1/08 (screening at Ritz Bourse); reviewed 1/25/09

The Reader (***1/4)

Three movies in one: a teen boy’s affair with an older woman (Kate Winslet), a young man’s learning about her past, and a grown man’s trying to reprocess the experience years later. The first part is interesting enough, but sort of perfunctory. If you’ve seen one movie about a virgin getting to act out his masturbatory fantasies, you’ve seen them all, and it doesn’t much matter that this takes place in postwar West Germany. The only novelty is that, besides the obvious, the boy reads to her. Perhaps teen lust is clouding his brain, for he seems not to realize, as we do rather quickly, that she is illiterate. This of course becomes a plot point later.

This early part of the movie was least compelling, but functions as setup to the rest. The plot details are best left unrevealed here, but given the setting, the nature of the revelations is easily guessed. What fascinates more is the question of how, having found out this information, one squares it with the kind lover of the first part. Director Stephen Daldry and screenwriter David Hare, as in their previous collaboration, The Hours, use the passage of time to make us reevaluate the characters. Winslet not only gets to age but also to play a character who seems sophisticated to the boy, but simple to the adult. Some have criticized the movie for making her character seem too sympathetic. Yet surely the whole point is that the viewer (or the reader, in the case of the Bernard Schlink novel from which this was adapted) get to decide whether she is sympathetic or not. This is the position in which the man finds himself; The Reader spends its last half as he wrestles to assess his relationship to the kind lover who could also be so thoughtlessly cruel.

IMDB link

viewed 12/16/09 at Ritz Five (screening) and reviewed 4/18/09

A Day for an Affair (**3/4)

This frothy quasi-romantic Korean comedy follows two married women who arrange to meet Internet lovers (despite adultery being illegal in South Korea). One plays the bossy older woman to a virginal college student, while the other turns out to be more interested in having an affair than actually having sex, much to her paramour’s frustration. The actresses are charming, and the college kid and the bossy woman are funny. Their sex scenes are natural and they look like they’re having fun, unlike the lovers in many an American film. What the movie could use is more story, more setup, and more of a look at the husbands the women feel compelled to cheat on. Likeable, but flawed.

IMDB link

viewed and reviewed 4/7/08; screened at Philadelphia Film Festival

Notes on a Scandal (***1/2)

? Judy Dench plays the character who was the narrator of Zoë Heller’s novel of the same name. A teacher of history to surly adolescents, she writes copiously in her diary, eruditely but witheringly sizing up her fellow faculty, including the new arts teacher (Cate Blanchett). Seemingly as honest about herself as others, she’s aware of her reputation as respected, but not liked, and so welcomes the friendship offered by the most recent hire. But when she discovers her married colleague’s affair with a fifteen-year-old student, she sees it as a betrayal that it had been kept secret from her.

+ This movie works as a thriller but more so as a morality play that looks at its characters more deeply than the Jerry Springer premise would suggest. The two women are very different, but both cross social boundaries and pay the consequences. The heavy dose of narration that introduces the story could have seemed tedious were it not for the crisp, tart voice that screenwriter Patrick Narber has created for her. Dench’s performance is a tour de force that slowly peels away her character’s vulnerabilities and flaws. She’s the clearest villain of the piece, but she’s a little pathetic as well, which you don’t expect at the outset. The supporting characters are also noteworthy, Blanchett of course but also Bill Nighy as her significantly older husband. This is the sort of movie where you can have a wonderful time afterward dissecting it and arguing about how blameworthy each of the women is, how society should treat adult affairs with teenagers, and so on. Narber’s best known for the play and screenplay Closer, which tackled certain similar themes relating to trust, but this is a warmer movie with a more linear plot structure and a higher emotional peak. 
- It certainly didn’t ruin it for me, but a pivotal scene near the end requires an uncharacteristic sloppiness on the part of Dench’s character that seemed more convenient than likely.

= ***1/2 I found this movie, which has earned Oscar nominations for Dench, Blanchett, Narber, and composer Philip Glass, quite riveting. It’s unusual to see a movie that so particularly examines some unsavory behavior and yet expresses human desires that everybody has in some fashion.

IMDb link