Valhalla Rising DVD Review
What do you get when a director known for uncompromising ultra-violence decides to do a period piece—set in 1,000AD Viking country, that is? In a word, a masterpiece.
Danish enfant terrible Nicolas Winding Refn (director of the cult hit “Pusher” series) made his latest film, “Valhalla Rising,” after an aborted attempt at making a “real” horror movie (Refn’s favorite film is the original “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”). But “Valhalla” itself almost qualifies for that title; it’s blunt, violent, and almost completely without dialogue. That being said it’s also hypnotically beautiful, and even the pretentiousness of Refn’s decision to label each section of the film (“Wrath,” “Hell,” “Sacrifice”) ends up, somehow, working in his favor.
The film follows Mads Mikkelsen, a frequent Refn collaborator, as One-Eye, a mute Viking mercenary with a badass facial scar who is being held captive by a band of nomadic warriors. The all-male group keeps One-Eye alive in order to make money off of his superhuman strength—they pit him against rival warrior captives for money, like dogfighting, and he never loses. One day, he decides he’s had enough and breaks free, killing almost everyone in the group except a young boy, who follows One-Eye around like an ersatz son.
The two strike out only to quickly fall in with a group of Christian crusaders bent on reaching Jerusalem. Eventually, One-Eye is convinced to go along on the journey, but inevitably things do not go according to plan. When the party finally reaches dry land (not Jerusalem – America) they have no idea where they are, and tensions rise. Refn makes much of the hypocrisy of these religious men, who sit around pontificating (and murdering each other) while One-Eye figures out the more mundane stuff, like finding food. One gets the feeling that Refn has rather strong feelings on the difference between real and artificial morality; One-Eye’s brutality is presented as crude but admirable, whereas the Brothers, bent on forcible conversion of the Pagans, are figured as monstrous in the extreme.
In the end, though, One-Eye can be interpreted as a messiah figure of sorts—a European invader sacrificing himself for the sins of all those who come after him. The film can easily be read as a reinterpretation of classic Greek epics, or perhaps as a retelling of “Heart of Darkness,” though none of Refn’s references are direct enough to make unpacking “Valhalla” an easy task. But it’s precisely this generous ambiguity that makes the film feel thematically (as well as literally) expansive. You can read into it whatever you want—or nothing at all. “Valhalla’s” meditative quality sets the film apart from any other old-school warrior flick you’ve ever seen; though it was shot primarily in Scotland, it’s as different from “Braveheart” as it’s possible to be. And trust me, that’s a good thing.
“Valhalla Rising” is currently available on DVD.
***
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Fair Game Review
By Felipe Cabrera
Fair Game, directed by Doug Liman, is the cinematic interpretation of the Valerie Plame story, starring Naomi Watts as Valerie Plame and Sean Penn as her husband, Joe Wilson. The film’s flaws are many, but they share the same root cause: the film’s creators forgot to dramatize the narrative.
Scooter Libby outing Valerie Plame as a CIA agent is an amazing story in itself. In the time leading up to the invasion of Iraq, the Bush Administration was paranoid over what might have happened in the First Gulf War had things gone differently—Saddam had allegedly been only six months away from building a nuclear weapon.
The film is partially a study of paranoia—the presence of Scooter Libby at the CIA signals that the White House doesn’t trust other departments to go about their business, and later in the film, when a former Iraqi military scientist is asked whether Saddam has or is developing WMDs, he responds in the negative, adding: “They know this. They must know,” referring to the American government. The film also features a fair amount of carefully chosen television news, including speeches by President Bush and highly pixelated clips of Al-Jazeera.
While the allusions to media saturation and paranoia are relevant, neither can make up for the lack of a dramatic plot or interesting characters. The film is set up as a thriller: from the get-go we go through successions of short cuts. Watts’ interpretation of Plame receives minimal screen time aside from her too-perfect responses to questioning while undercover and unmoving exchanges with her husband and her father.
Joe Wilson writes an op-ed in the New York Times calling out the Bush Administration for trumping up charges against Niger in order to justify the invasion of Iraq. Penn plays an outspoken, albeit patriotic man who is often telling the truth. The problem is he’s not interesting and becomes difficult to listen to over the course of the film.
Films should be evaluated on their own terms. As an adaptation of the news, Fair Game succeeds as a slow recollection of some of the hysteria that preceded the Invasion of Iraq. This will be a great film to show our children in history classes, but frankly, I’d prefer if they read about it instead. In its final act, the film morphs into a kind of patriotic-let’s-together-for-ourselves piece of American pride complete with Sean Penn lecturing passionately to a group of college students.
After Plame is outed by Libby, the CIA shuts down Plame’s operation leaving an Iraqi military scientist to die, along with practically everyone else in the young doctor’s family. When the doctor’s sister, played by Liraz Charhi, confronts Plame about the whereabouts of her family, she reacts unconvincingly with minimal emotion to the news that nearly everyone in her extended family has been butchered, completing the half-baked subplot.
Earlier in the film, Charhi’s character asks Plame how she is able to lie. Plame responds that one must always know why one is lying and to never forget the truth. Despite a valiant effort to stick to the facts, there is little truth to be taken from Fair Game.
Tags: Doug Liman, Fair Game, Joe Wilson, naomi watts, Sean Penn, Valerie Plame
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Down Terrace Review
By Felipe Cabrera
Down Terrace is a psychological crime film about a family in a rural English town. While the film lags at times due to its being set mostly in a single house and occasionally out in the country, it succeeds as a moving portrait of family succession.
Father and son Bill and Karl (real life father and son Bob and Robin Hill) have been released from jail, but with freedom comes problems. Bill questions his son’s loyalty when Karl pledges to marry his pregnant girlfriend. To make matters worse, an unidentified informant is threatening the family business.
The plot shares similarities with Scorcese’s The Departed, the key difference being the relationship between the boss character and the main underling, which happens to be a father and son in Down Terrace. Whereas in The Departed the plot thickens as DiCaprio’s character jumps through hoops to prove he’s not a rat, Bill doesn’t put as much thought to it and just starts offing people.
While this sounds more macabre, Down Terrace is actually more realistic and less stylized because these murders happen on-screen. In a memorable scene from The Departed, DiCaprio’s character visits his boss’s bar for an assignment and finds Nicholson’s character nonchalantly holding a severed hand. In Down Terrace, death isn’t loudly alluded to: the viewer sees death come after messy struggles between hoodlums. After Karl is accosted in a concrete passageway by a man with a switchblade, he wrestles him to the ground and kills him. He then confronts his father, still uncertain over who tried to off him, the blood stains on his jumper looking like a crimson Rorschach blot.
While the violence is troubling, it’s not sensationalized as in Scorcese’s film, which makes it more final. In this film, killings are plot-fueling decisions rather than opportunities for stylized violence.
The meat of this film occurs in the carefully-rendered exchanges between characters. Often we see characters speaking to one another and the camera spends an inordinate amount of time on the person listening. For example, in the beginning of the film Bill tells his son he got into the drug game because he believed it would lead to higher levels of consciousness, perhaps even some sort of transcendence.
While all of this sounds quite romantic, one can’t help but roll one’s eyes. What the viewer sees is the excellent Robin Hill playing an exasperated Karl, who is at his wit’s end with his father’s musings. Much of the tension in the film comes from Karl’s exasperation with his father’s senseless sense of cool and his mother’s ability to deal with it.
The true strength of this film is the honesty with which it articulates troubled family relations. Bill and his wife Maggie (Julia Deakin) are aging sociopaths. Karl is capable but troubled. While this film is thematically similar to the excellent Australian crime film Animal Kingdom, it is both less disturbing and less enthralling because of it.
After seeing Animal Kingdom, one has to recover from the portrayal of evil in that film. Down Terrace is different. Whereas a recurring idea in Animal Kingdom is eat or be eaten, Down Terrace is about smoothing things out between people. Karl is a tortured soul. He is on medication for mood swings and when he kills his father, he tells him it’s because he can’t “talk to [him] anymore.” If Animal Kingdom is about absolute cold-bloodedness among a family of criminals, Down Terrace is about finding a way to still be a family. Killing is justified as a way to start anew.
DOWN TERRACE is out now in limited release.
Tags: Down Terrace, Felipe Cabrera
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Leaving Review
By Felipe Cabrera
What would have happened had Emma Bovary killed her husband instead of taking her own life? What circumstances would have led her to do so? Leaving, directed by Catherine Corsini and starring Kristin Scott Thomas (Suzanne), Yvan Attal (Samuel), and Sergi Lopez (Iván), sets out to answer this second question.
Suzanne is a forty year-old housewife living in the South of France who decides to become a physiotherapist. Her husband Samuel agrees to build her an office, but before its completion she falls in love with Iván, a Spanish laborer. Complications arise when she confesses to her husband but continues to seek her Spaniard.
Thomas portrays Suzanne as an impulsive, flighty, and not altogether bright character. But Corsini forces us to take her seriously. If we want to judge her, we must empathize with her as well. In a wide-angle shot of a Spanish plaza, Iván kisses Suzanne then she walks away. In the next scene, the camera pans rightward across the windshield of Suzanne’s moving car on the trip back from Spain. Suzanne reaches off camera for what we assume is Iván’s hand: a quick, silent moment of reciprocation. The affair begins.
It doesn’t take long to realize that Suzanne’s husband actually took advantage of her when he “rescued” her from life as an au pair. Samuel is a mean-spirited, abusive creep. At the beginning of the movie, Iván is the only convicted criminal, but during the movie his conduct is the least questionable. Suzanne’s refusal to compromise and act rationally lead her to abandon her family and commit murder.
One of the film’s major themes is the relationships people have with their bodies and other people’s bodies. Suzanne is a physiotherapist: she heals people by moving their body parts through uncomfortable positions (in one not so unsubtle scene, she puts pressure on a women’s leg while repeating the French word for “push” [hint: it sounds like another word in English]). Samuel is a doctor, but we never see him heal people; he just seeks to control them, Suzanne especially. In one scene, Samuel refers to Suzanne as a “bitch in heat” before locking her in a room. And during Suzanne’s first sex scene with Iván, some creative sound editing results in some truly canine-sounding breathing.
Leaving poses some uncomfortable questions, but it ultimately comes up short. At its worst, it plays like a politically correcter (depending on your perspective) version of Madame Bovary: a modern day morality tale whose artful touches are dulled by unsubtle identity politics.
Subject matter and politics are the discretion of writers and directors, and especially writer-directors like Ms. Corsini. While she is obviously very talented, she failed to dream big with this feature. There is not enough novelty here to hold strong interest nor does the feministic element provide much intrigue. One of the major themes of the original Madame Bovary is the banality of bourgeois life, which Ms. Corsini seems to have hammered home here without saying anything new. But she doesn’t really expand upon it, which results in a pretty unsatisfying feature. As Suzanne and Iván carry on their charade, it becomes difficult not to judge them too much and to even care about them as characters. But maybe that’s the point.
LEAVING is now playing in limited release.
Tags: Catherine Corsini, Kristin Scott Thomas, Leaving, Partir, Sergi Lopez, Yvan Attal
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Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps Review.
By Felipe Cabrera
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps stars Shia LeBeouf as Jake Moore, a “Wall Street guy” determined to marry his girlfriend Winnie and invest in green technology (fusion), at least until the stock market tanks. In the wake of his mentor’s suicide, financial tycoon Lewis Zabel (Frank Langella), and the plummeting marketplace, Moore proposes to Winnie (Carey Mulligan).
Winnie happens to be the daughter of the infamous Gordon Gekko, reprised by Michael Douglas, who is a few years out of jail and peddling a new book. Moore approaches Gordon and they strike a deal together. Gekko will do business with Moore in exchange for another chance with his daughter. Winnie hasn’t spoken to her father since she was 14-years-old.
Moore then confronts Bretton James (Josh Brolin) of Churchill Schwartz, the man partially responsible for the demise of Keller Zabel, his own firm. Impressed by Moore’s grit, James hires him. Gordon suspects that James was the one who sold him out to the Feds back in the 80s.
Post-lockup Gekko says he’s motivated by time, not vengeance, and indeed time is perhaps the central theme of the film. For the young idealists, Jake and Winnie, time seems to be the only capital they have left. For Gordon, time doesn’t mean possibility. It represents fate.
Michael Douglas plays a more nuanced, slightly sympathetic Gordon Gekko, a more Scrooge, less Satan kind of guy. The original Wall Street was an allegorical morality tale that dealt with insider trading. The sequel has its sights set a little higher: the shit storm the real Wall Street has been embroiled in for the last few years, which is infinitely more complicated. For Stone, merely explaining the plot’s background requires a fair amount of floating numbers, skyline-tracing graphs, and excerpts from both real and fake news programs (sadly no Daily Show). It isn’t until near the end of the movie that the real culprit is revealed: credit default swaps, and other questionably-rated bonds that propelled Frank Langella’s character to Anna Karenina himself at the close of the first act. Screen veteran Eli Wallach gives a particularly memorable performance as a whistling voice of wisdom for Churchill-Schwartz.
There are beautiful shots of New York in this film, perhaps some of the best in any film in recent years. The acting is on point, but the scenes between LeBeouf and Susan Sarandon feel forced. Sarandon plays LeBeouf’s mother who works as a real-estate agent, an illustrative character for the real estate bubble. While Douglas’ warnings about irresponsible practices both inform and drive the plot forward, the final confrontation between LeBeouf and Sarandon doesn’t ring as true as Stone might have intended.
Recent events are everywhere in this movie. One cannot watch Douglas’s performance without feeling the echoes of his present. When Gekko apologizes to his daughter for his mistakes, she reproaches him for not having been there to prevent her brother’s overdose. Douglas delivers a particularly sober but passionate response. Given Douglas’s son’s drug use, and his own recent cancer diagnosis (cancer having replaced greed as Gecko’s favorite word in this film), one can’t help but construe the trials of Douglas’s own life with his character’s.
WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS opens on September 24th in theaters nationwide.
The Eclipse DVD Review
by Lita Robinson
Irish actor Ciaran Hinds has been a fixture of British and Irish TV and film for decades. I loved him in Prime Suspect 3 (1993), and since then he’s only become more popular; this fall, he’ll be appearing as Dumbledore’s brother in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
In Conor McPherson’s The Eclipse Hinds plays Michael Farr, a man who recently lost his wife to cancer, and who is struggling to take care of his two young children while also volunteering at the local literary festival. While helping out at the festival, Farr meets Lena Morelle (Iben Hjejle), a novelist with a flair for the fantastic—her latest book is about seeing ghosts. Farr himself has suddenly begun seeing apparitions of his elderly father-in-law, and feels an instant kinship with Morelle because of her seeming expertise on the subject.
As the two grow closer, Farr’s ghost sightings become more extreme, and Morelle is pursued by a one-time love interest, played with boozy verve by Aidan Quinn. Everything eventually comes to a head—but the film doesn’t devolve into horror-film cliché, nor does it turn into a sappy supernatural romance story. Instead, it stays quiet, thoughtful, and realistic—once the film ends, you have the distinct feeling that anyone could see a ghost, no matter how sane they are.
The Eclipse’s poignancy is anchored by Hinds’ earnest, sympathetic performance (which netted him a Best Actor award at Tribeca in 2009) and this is what keeps it from tipping over into ghost story absurdity. McPherson’s directing is also wonderfully understated—the film has a real life to it, with fully developed characters and a setting (County Cork, Ireland) that’s just misty enough to be a little otherworldly. This film is perfect to curl up with on a chilly fall night.
The Eclipse is now available on DVD.
Tags: ciaran hinds, the eclipse
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Review: I Am Love
by Lita Robinson
For those perpetually longing to return to the days of Visconti, Fellini, and Bergman, have I got a film for you. I Am Love is glorious: everything about it is lush and larger than life, and even in moments when the plot drags and the pounding John Adams soundtrack pauses, the cinematography is breathtaking. As a whole, the film is as intoxicating as any of its arthouse forbears, and yet the intensity and pace of its narrative makes it feel updated and almost modern.
Tilda Swinton, who also produced and helped conceive the film with director Luca Guadagnino, stars as Emma Recchi, a Russian ex-pat who has married into a prestigious Milanese family. The story begins with a family dinner in which the patriarch, who is about to die, turns over the family textile business to Emma’s husband Tancredi (Pippo Delbono) and son Edo (Flavio Parenti). Emma begins to realize, with her youngest child Elisabetta (Alba Rohrwacher) going off to college, that her duties as a mother have been fulfilled, and she feels at sea as to what to do with herself next.
This being an Italian art film, naturally the next thing she does is fall wildly, passionately, inappropriately in love. Edo’s friend Antonio (Edoardo Gabriellini) is an ambitious young chef who shows up at the initial dinner party to drop off a cake he has made for the occasion. Emma is taken with him from the start; he’s a working-class boy who isn’t indoctrinated in the ways of the very rich, and he has a genuine talent. His character seems much more authentic than those of Emma’s two sons, or the rest of the men in the Recchi clan, all of whom seem overly focused on accumulating even more wealth than they already have. Antonio is focused on pleasure and beauty and Emma quickly becomes infatuated, even as she tries to deny it to herself.
Once she has a meal in his restaurant, though, Emma is a goner. As she savors her plate of beautifully prepared prawns, a warm golden light covers her and everything else in the restaurant goes dim. Guadagnino’s skill at visualizing Emma’s intense pleasure in this scene, and in the already infamous al fresco sex scenes later in the film, stays just this side of absurdity. Even though he takes every opportunity to make almost lurid comparisons between the writhing bodies and the bobbing flowers in Antonio’s field, somehow the film doesn’t feel self-indulgent or ridiculous. Rather, it’s contemplative in a way that very few films are these days. Occasionally we are treated to the opportunity to just stare at a piece of lovely Italian countryside or an ancient statue; the lens moves in and out of focus, dreamily, mirroring Emma’s ethereal rapture with this newfound secret life.
There’s a great tragedy at the end of the film, of course—Emma’s life is ruined, her affair comes out, and she is all but banished from the Recchi family. The film starts to feel like a grand Greek tragedy or perhaps a lost Merchant/Ivory film, with everything suddenly seeming pre-ordained and inescapable. However, instead of wilting in submission, Swinton’s Emma decides to leave the family on her own terms. As the soundtrack comes to a throbbing crescendo, we realize what Emma is really about to do is escape—escape from everything that has defined her existence for decades, and finally, for the first time, make a life for herself. And we can’t help but cheer her for it.
While some might not know what to make of I Am Love in this day and age, when it inhabits the same screen space as Sex and the City 2, I highly recommend it. As always, Tilda Swinton is captivating in every corner of her performance; the supporting cast, particularly Rohrwacher, all give dedicated performances as well. Even if you’ve never seen anything like it before—and you probably haven’t—giving yourself over to the film, as Emma does to her newfound zest for life, is simply thrilling.
I Am Love opened in the U.S. in limited release on June 18th.
Tags: i am love, tilda swinton
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Review: Predators
by Lita Robinson
Predators (2010) is supposed to be a 21st century update on a beloved scifi flick from the Reagan administration. The 1987 original, of course, starred Arnold Schwarzenegger (now Governor of California, who can be seen in the ongoing thriller Budget Deficit) as a tough-as-nails mercenary type who lands in the jungle and must take on an alien killing machine with dreadlocks. (And infrared vision, a built-in ray gun, the ability to become invisible…you get the idea.) Arnie used brains and brawn to eventually outwit the monster, and it seemed like a franchise had been born. Oddly, unlike the wildly successful and contemporaneous Alien films, Predator spawned only one sequel (1990) and then lay dormant until the brainwave that was Alien vs. Predator arrived in 2004. But that film, ingenious as its premise was—take two monsters and put them in the same movie!—didn’t really feel like an honest-to-god sequel. This left the proverbial door open for Predators, which lumbered onto screens nationwide last weekend.
On its own, it’s not a great film. The characters are wooden, the dialogue is uneven, and no one ever really explains the film’s premise (a bunch of mercenary types plus a convict and a doctor get dropped onto an alien planet to act as game for sport-happy Predators). It’s hard to really get invested in Predators because the characters aren’t sympathetic, and the editing is so rushed that it can be hard to tell what’s going on. It feels more like a made-for-TV movie than an actual feature film. This is especially disappointing given the film’s director, Nimod Antal, began his career in 2003 with the excellent Hungarian film Kontroll and then apparently sold out to Hollywood (his next film, Vacancy (2007), was almost shockingly bad). That being said, the creature CGI in Predators is reasonably engaging—the Predators themselves are guys in suits, much along the line of the uruk-hai in the Lord of the Rings films. There are various CGI beasties who periodically swoop in and attack the unlucky pack of humans, and those few truly suspenseful moments are pretty fun to watch.
The elephant in the room in this film is the fact that Arnie’s role as ultimate alpha male has been taken over by…Adrien Brody. A bizarre casting choice to be sure, but Brody, an Oscar winner, gamely attempts to morph himself into an action hero. The results are mixed—while he growls all of his lines with an appropriate devil-may-care affect, it’s just really difficult to take him seriously. The film’s climactic moment involves Brody doing shirtless battle with one of the Predators, and while he’s certainly not the wisp he was back in The Pianist, there’s something about him that just doesn’t work in this context. The film’s only woman, played by Alex Braga, often seems the most macho of all the characters.
It’s worth noting that America’s concept of masculinity has changed dramatically since 1987—when the Reagan administration had ordered real-life mercenaries into real-life jungles in Central America—but it seems the action film hasn’t evolved, even if the action hero has. What Predators needs in Brody’s role is an absolute stereotype, and perhaps because Brody is known for intimate, idiosyncratic characters, he actually needs to work harder to portray a less complicated one.
Tags: adrien brody, predators
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Review: Winter’s Bone
by Lita Robinson
Winter’s Bone is a story of poverty, desperation, and the scrappy resourcefulness of women. The film follows 17-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) in her quest to save her family from homelessness. She cares for her near-catatonic mother and two younger siblings alone, in a shabby house in rural Missouri, until the Law comes calling. She is informed that her missing father, Jessup, has put up the family property as collateral on a bail bond. If he doesn’t show up to court, the family will be turned out into the snow.
What follows is a story as simple and taut as an old-school Western. Ree sets out to track down her father, but every step along the way turns into a do-or-die endeavor: just getting her hands on a vehicle and keeping her siblings fed is an enormous feat. Her every interaction with other characters—even those trying to help her—crackles with tension. Even extended family members turn on her without warning. Knowing she can’t trust anyone, Ree has learned to rely only on herself, and so we are treated to long sequences of her walking endlessly through the gray Mid-western woodlands, skinny and alone. There isn’t a lot of talking in Winter’s Bone, but the film is shot through with a deep, poignant resentment of authority and the status quo. At one point, Ree admonishes her hungry siblings to “never ask for what ought to be offered.”
Lawrence carries off such lines, which could turn to cheese in the wrong hands, with an earnest passion. What makes her a fully realized character rather than a spectacle or a stereotype is the fact that director Debra Granik allows the audience time to breathe, to soak in Ree’s reality and to contemplate her depressing surroundings. We aren’t shown her pathetic house in voyeuristic flashes; there are no sappy montages of her worn-out furniture and clothes. Instead, we are at her elbow as she cooks for her family and next to her on a barn floor after she’s been beaten up. Granik, like Ree, keeps things moving and stays focused on the task at hand. The result is beautifully balanced, that rare film that’s both contemplative and thrilling.
Perhaps the most obvious progenitor of Winter’s Bone is Frozen River (2008), another excellent film that also received accolades at Sundance and the like. As with Bone, River follows a female protagonist (Oscar nominee Melissa Leo) and boasts a female writer/director (Courtney Hunt). It is a film of similar minimalism—and similar quality. What elevates Winter’s Bone and Frozen River from the realms of so-called “poverty porn” is both films’ insistence on simply telling the women’s stories, neither sensationalizing nor apologizing for their subject matter, even though the characters’ poverty is sometimes shocking. Hopefully, this new aesthetic of raw reality and female resilience is the tip of the proverbial iceberg; one Winter’s Bone is worth more than a thousand Twilights.
Tags: jennifer lawrence, winter's bone
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It’s Complicated DVD Review
by Lita Robinson
Nancy Meyers is a Hollywood powerhouse. Not only does she write, produce, and direct her own films, she has a level of power and control over her work that is rare even for a man. The fact that she’s a woman makes her such a singular entity that the outer vapidity of her films deserves a second look.
Think about Meyer’s first blockbuster What Women Want (2000), in which Mel Gibson suddenly develops the ability to read women’s minds, and tries to get in touch with his “feminine side” in order to reconnect with his teenage daughter. The outer implication of the film is that what every woman really needs is just to find the right man (yawn) and her problems will be solved. (Also, all women are insane.) But think about the actual action of the film: we see Mel in many compromising positions—shaving his legs, applying mascara and donning pantyhose. In a very obvious way, the film is giving us a queer, subversive picture of a major movie star in the same breath as it props up the oldest of Hollywood stereotypes.
With that in mind, It’s Complicated becomes much more interesting than it first appears. The story follows Jane (Meryl Streep, fabulous as ever) a 60-ish divorcee who runs a glamorous bakery business and feels the inexplicable need to expand her already enormous kitchen. Alec Baldwin is Jake, her ex, who is unhappily re-married to a much younger and more annoying woman (Lake Bell). The two are brought together by their son’s college graduation, during which they both become aware that the spark that brought them together hasn’t quite gone out. They have a drunken tryst in a chic Manhattan hotel before everyone heads back to verdant California, where things are supposed to get back to normal.
They don’t, of course, and things get complicated indeed when Jane and Jake start sneaking around. Even as her attraction to her milquetoast architect Adam (Steve Martin) grows, Jane finds she can’t tear herself away from Jake, even when he misses dates and invades her privacy. Eventually things come to a head and Jane throws Jake out for good, but not before they share a last wistful moment on a garden bench (her garden is even more preposterous than her kitchen). For all their sophomoric shenanigans, the last parting of Jane and Jake is surprisingly…adult. The film ends with Jane and Adam restarting their relationship as her house—an analogy for her life—gets ready to expand.
What makes It’s Complicated interesting is the fact that it maintains a staunchly middle-aged perspective most of the time—possible exceptions include Jane’s get-togethers with her other middle-aged friends, which feel completely contrived and uncomfortable. For example, Jake’s new wife Agness is obsessed with getting pregnant, and her attention to fertility and associated matters is portrayed as maniacal. Jane’s three adult children, on the other hand, are blond, beautiful, and pretty much self-sufficient. Jane represents the best things about aging—the Good Life—while Agness, with her pretentiously spelled name, represents the worst of being young.
As with all of Meyers’ movies, this film takes place in a totally unrealistic fantasy world. Everyone drives a nice car and has a huge house, and there’s not a non-White person to be seen. It’s like recession porn; for 90 minutes, you can immerse yourself in a living Pottery Barn commercial, where none of the characters ever has to worry about petty things like health insurance or making rent. But perhaps this backdrop is necessary in order to keep the film’s focus on bending the Hollywood rules about aging. Meyers seems to think that if we’re going to confront such an enormous taboo as Sex after Sixty, having the characters decked out in Brooks Brothers and Eileen Fisher might make it a little more palatable. However, for all its faults, it’s hard to remember the last time an older woman was portrayed in such a positive way outside of another Nancy Meyers movie—that alone makes It’s Complicated worth seeing. Just don’t watch it with your parents.
Tags: alec baldwin, it's complicated, meryl streep, nancy meyers
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