The Oranges (***1/4)

Lots of adults have a childhood best friend with whom they grew apart. For Vanessa (Alia Shawkat), who narrates this dramatic comedy, that friend was Nina (Leighton Meester), who eventually fell in with a more popular crowd and left the North Jersey suburbs for more glamorous places. But Vanessa has kept up with Nina because her parents (Hugh Laurie, Catherine Keener) are the neighbors and best friends of Nina’s parents (Alison Janney, Oliver Platt). The theme of friends growing apart is regrettably minor; instead, the main plot involves Nina’s quickly discovered romance with David, who is Vanessa’s father (Laurie).

The older actors don’t look like the parents of the younger ones playing their daughters, but they’re all pretty good, and all of the characters are fairly sympathetic, though the prime trait of Janney’s is being overbearing. Meester does both the wayward daughter thing and the flirty seductress thing well. You can tell how much fun Nina is having when David introduces her to friends they run into at a restaurant. Nina invites the surprised couple to sit down; their awkward declining of this offer is as amusing to Nina as it will no doubt be to viewers of the film. The potentially heavy subject matter is generally given this sort of light touch, as befits a film that is mostly a comedy. However, the story concludes realistically and in reasonably satisfying fashion.

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viewed 10/11/12 7:10 pm at Ritz Five and reviewed 10/11/12

Revolutionary Road (***1/4)

Ah, the suburbs, the fertile playgrounds of wholesome family life. Or, maybe, a stifling social desert of conformity where dreams go to die. That’s one difference between mainstream and indie sensibility. Revolutionary Road, not to be confused with Reservation Road, obviously leans to the latter. Titanic lovers Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio reunite, mostly unhappily, as the strivers of Richard Yates’s novel, published in 1961, when the critique of the suburbs as sterile had only begun to gel. (Surely, if Sinclair Lewis had written 1920’s Main Street a few decades later, he’d have set it in a bedroom community, not a small town.)

Yates means the suburbs as a stand-in for the worst aspects of postwar America as a whole, and Winslet’s character, April Wheeler, as a tragic heroine. Screenwriter Justin Haythe and director Sam Mendes hew close to Yates’s plot, though it’s less clear that they share April’s anti-conformist sensibility. She can instead be seen as an unhappy woman who pushes her office-worker husband, Frank, to be someone he’s not as a substitute for her own failed ambitions. (In the opening, she’s an actress in a bad local theater production.) Her desire—which she persuades Frank to share—to escape her Connecticut suburb can seem desperate, the location only symbolic.

And yet Winslet synthesizes this volatile woman so that she seems comprehensible, though not necessarily to her husband. Director Mendes is on familiar ground, having directed American Beauty, to which Yate’s novel has been compared. There, it was the husband who rebels against conformity, and his wife who has the affair. (Frank, disregarding cliché, seduces his new secretary.) Revolutionary Road is similar to American Beauty, but not as distinctive. It is equally well shot. A hall-of-mirrors-style shot of hats and suits lined up waiting for the train, and another scene where Frank and April run into the forest remaining in their development, stand out.

But there is not the arch humor, nor the quirkiness, though they may not have been to some tastes anyway. Similar, perhaps, are the not-altogether-agreeable characters, who include a mental patient whom the Wheelers reluctantly befriend. The many scenes of confrontation that form a lot of the movie have the effect of keeping them at an emotional remove. Perhaps this is intentional.

Frank is a talky character, and, indie film or not, Revolutionary Road is not quiet or effete, or especially subtle. Whether seen as a story of a mismatched couple or an existential dilemma about selling out one’s one dreams, it consistently held my interest.

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viewed 1/5(?)/09 at Ritz East; reviewed 1/14/09

Disturbia (**1/4)

? Confined to house arrest after slugging his teacher out of displaced anger at losing his father, a teenager (Shia LaBeouf) fills his days spying on the neighbors, including the gal next door and, from another window, someone more sinister.
+ Taking a page from Hitchcock’s Rear Window, in which Jimmy Stewart suspects his neighbor has committed a murder, is a pretty good idea. Jimmy didn’t have the advantage of cell phones, or the disadvantage of an electronic ankle monitor, and the movie cleverly works technology into the story. The actors are likeable.
- What’s not clever is the paint-by-numbers ending, which delivers everything I expected and not much I’d hoped for, such as originality or plausibility. The apparent villain (David Morse) seems like a careless fool. And the psychological aspects of the Hitchcock masterpiece are absent, making the opening car-crash sequence seem like a cheap stunt. Although it’s the basis for the plotline, the father’s death never gets mentioned again.
= **1/4 If the cookie-cutter ending doesn’t bother you, the story moves along briskly, with some funny moments in between the suspenseful ones. But it was all setup, not much payoff.

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reviewed 4/19/07

Little Children (***1/4)

? A young mother, Sarah felt something missing from her life. She would sometimes chat with the trio of fellow suburban housewives that gathered daily in a nearby playground, but did not think herself one of them. She couldn’t quite adopt their child-centered worldview, did not, for example, agree that the local sex offender, who after all had only exposed himself, ought to actually be castrated. But when she met Brad, another young parent, both of them felt a connection, the presence of something missing from their current relationships. So it is in Todd Field’s adaptation of Tom Perrotta’s novel, which stars Kate Winslet as Sarah, Patrick Wilson as Brad, and Jennifer Connelly as Brad’s wife.

+  The movie features a number of passages from the novel read in a voice that sounds like one of those book-on-tape guys. The effect is somewhere between arch humor and deliberate distance. The narrator’s disconcerting, yet I missed him when he went away. Field and his actors also more subtly convey a lot about these people’s lives and motivations. Winslet’s Sarah is definitely the most fleshed out, and the actress gives another great performance. While this is no action thriller, the pacing is quicker than in Field’s previous effort, In the Bedroom.

- Even if In the Bedroom was slow, it moved inexorably to a simple but satisfying ending that both fit the story and the characters. The ending here has too much timed to happen at once and isn’t as convincing. A smaller problem is that you can tell this was adapted from a novel. Nothing seems missing, exactly, but you feel like there ought to have been more to a few characters, particularly to Sarah’s husband, who’s a little more rounded out in the novel (which Perrotta adapted with Field).

= ***1/4 This isn’t going to be a movie for everyone. It’s unsettling, particularly with the voice-over, and it takes a detached view of its morally ambiguous characters. I think a lot of people will come out of the movie trying to figure out what it was trying to say, and why a sex offender plot was mixed into a story about potential adultery. On the other hand, the same odd mixture kept me watching to see where everything was going.

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