BEATRIZ AT DINNER

Directer Miguel Arteta and writer Mike White follow their collaboration on THE GOOD GIRL with this hamfisted painfully earnest take on the class divide in contemporary America.  Salma Hayek plays Beatriz, a massage therapist and earnest do-gooder who treats both suffering cancer patients and rich capitalist bastards.  As the film opens, there's a chance it might be a comedy.  Beatriz is quirky!  She keeps goats in her house and has a habit of saying socially inappropriate things and invading people's space.  But that isn't what this film is.  When Beatriz' car breaks down at a client's (Connie Britton - NASHVILLE) house in Newport Beach, that client invites her to stay for dinner - a small celebration of future profits on a real estate development.  The rich guests (Chloe Sevigny, Jay Duplass) proceed to ignore Beatriz, then assume she's the help, then ignore her disquiet at their development.  But when the richest and most evil of the men (John Lithgow) reveals he also hunts rhinos, Beatriz really loses it.

The problem I have with this film is that it isn't a biting political satire or a nuanced portrait of class or race relations. Rather it's a pantomime filled with caricatures.  The bad guys here are truly bad.  The airhead dippy wives are just that.  And Beatriz is ultimately a Christlike martyr of zero flaws and faults. This makes for dull, dumb, simplistic storytelling.  The audience deserves far more.

AT DINNER has a running time of 83 minutes and is rated R. The movie played Sundance 2017 and opens in the USA on June 9th.

LANDLINE

LANDLINE is a laugh out loud relationship comedy set in the mid-90s from direct Gillian Robespierre starring stand-up comedian Jenny Slate (THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE).  It shows us a close knit family dealing with the fall out from two affairs, and focuses heavily on the female relationships and reactions with that.  

The parents are played by Edie Falco (THE SOPRANOS) and John Turturro (THE NIGHT OF).  He's a failed novelist having an affair with a woman who provides the praise his wife fails to.  And while the movie gives his crisis some time, the main focus is on the complicated and moving reaction of his wife.  Of the children, the eldest is Dana (Slate) - a quirky and bubbly girl who has just become engaged to her long-time boyfriend Ben (Jay Duplass) but has an affair with her old flame Nate (Finn Wittrock).  I love that the writers of the film dare to give us in Dana what could be, and for some will be, a fairly dislikable character.  Dana can come across as spoiled and unthinking in her actions.  The writers are trying to make the point that women who have affairs are typically portrayed less sympathetically than men who do - and I get that - but it felt to me as thought the pendulum may have swung too far the other way. After all, if the mother gets a psychologically complex and fully explored reaction to her husband's affair, why can't Ben get more than a montage?  The family is rounded out by simultaneously the wisest and dumbest member of the family - little sister Ali (newcomer Abby Quinn).  She's a bright high school student who often seems the most emotionally mature of all concerned, but she's also making dumb choices in the name of rebellion. I found this section of the film the most fascinating and authentic, and Quinn to be the true star of the film.

LANDLINE is beautifully observed and has a light touch in recreating the 1990s.  It's constantly laugh-out loud funny and has some fantastic sight gags. I had a fantastic time watching despite my reservations of its treatment of the male characters. As I said, I get the need for balance in portrayal of female and male characters, but it just felt as though it had moved too far in the other direction for my liking.

LANDLINE has a running time of 93 minutes and is not yet rated. The movie played Sundance and San Francisco 2017 and opens in the USA on July 21st.

Random DVD Round-Up 6 - THE PUFFY CHAIR

So I should've written up THE PUFFY CHAIR years ago, but looking back at 2010, and realising that CYRUS was the movie I loved the most, prompted me to finally get round to doing it. That and being snowed in, wondering whether my Christmas vacation was going to be cancelled. It's amazing how much crap you get round to doing - filing your pay-cheques, organising your sock drawer (literally), and writing up old film reviews....

THE PUFFY CHAIR is basically a relationship movie set up as a road trip. Two brothers and a girlfriend drive from New York to their parents house in Atlanta to give their father the gift of a new lazyboy chair. The elder brother is caught in a bind with a highly dramatic needy woman. The younger brother happens upon a woman he likes. And both brothers are struggling with the nature of their relationship to each other given their wildly differing personalities.

THE PUFFY CHAIR is the kind of movie I normally hate, given that it's characters are slacker/hipster/moany/whiny twentysomethings who are basically pretty privileged but spend their time stressing about what life is all about and what they are going to be When They Grow Up. BUT the key difference here is that while its characters ARE self-indulgent, the movie IS NOT. And that's a nicety I think many reviewers and message-board-posters have over-looked. I am not disagreeing that the elder brother Josh is passive-aggressive, or that his girlfriend is an irritating drama-queen, or that his brother Rhett is immature and narcissistic. I'm not disagreeing that, like, calling, like, everyone, dude, is, like, irritating. But if you're trying to capture certain people at a certain point in their lives, then maybe this is the reality. And maybe, it's more honest than a Hollywood hipster rom-com like (500) DAYS OF SUMMER or a movie like CLERKS which deals with real frustrations and dilemmas but with a hyper-real set of comedy twists and dialogue that none of us bar Kevin Smith can come up with?

All I can say is that I've met these people and I've been through those phases, and had those uncomfortable midnight conversations about real relationships. So whether or not I'd care to see this film again (probably not!) it was still refreshing and interesting to see it that one time.

THE PUFFY CHAIR played Sundance 2005 and went on limited release in the US and UK in 2006 and 2007 respectively. It is available on DVD.

CYRUS - He *loved* his mother

I love CYRUS. It’s a movie that’s honest, funny, dark and moving. I haven’t seen a sweeter more unlikely romance on screen in years – and rarely one in which the characters are at once so spiky and unusual and yet express such honest emotion. John C Reilly plays a basically good guy, also called John, who is still reeling from divorce and lacks the confidence to date again. Pushed to a party by his remarkably tolerant ex-wife (Catherine Keener) he stumbles upon the beautiful Molly (Marisa Tomei). The scene in which they meet could be taught in film-school as a lesson in how to subvert the “meet-cute” with something far more surprising. There’s a drunk, dejected guy pissing against a tree and a woman walks by and says “Nice penis!” I mean, what an awesome reaction! Immediately we know that’s she’s got an off-beat sense of humour. And then John starts talking to her and immediately denigrating himself: “What are you doing in the garden with Shrek?” But as much as he thinks he’s scored, he’s so drunk and, in a sense, so innocent, that when the Human League’s “Don’t you want me?” starts playing he basically brushes her off to go dance in the living room. Of course he makes a complete ass of himself, but the most amazing thing happens. Rather than being weirded out by what a drunk loser he is, the hot chick saves him by dancing and singing too. I think this is pretty much the most genuinely cute meet-cute I’ve seen.

There is, of course, a glitch to this odd-couple romance, otherwise we wouldn’t have a narrative arc. Molly has a son called Cyrus. And Molly and Cyrus have a very un-boundaried relationship. Cyrus is the kind of kid who should have grown up and gone to college and gotten a girlfriend but is so molly-coddled by his mother that he has become self-centred and unstable. He is massively threatened by John, who he sees as a rival for his mother’s attentions and basically tries to sabotage the relationship. This leads to a comedy of manners in which both Cyrus and John pretend to be getting on well to please Molly but are secretly sabotaging each other. Things come to a head and John’s ex-wife’s wedding where all the bitterness is exposed. This leads to a truly amazing third act, where the movie turns from indie rom-com into tragic-drama, as Cyrus and Molly confront how messed up their relationship is.

I love CYRUS on so many levels it’s hard to know where to begin. John C Reilly has that great mix of being able to act both as a loveable chump but also as a wily reader of the messed up relationship he encounters. Marisa Tomei is one of those charming actresses with whom you’re happy to spend time. But the actor who really impressed me was Jonah Hill, who for the first time managed to beyond his smart-ass, slightly weird screen persona and deliver a heart-breaking redemption scene. Behind the camera, I think you have to give the writer-director Duplass Brothers mad props for managing to portray a situation that could have been gross – oedipal complex plays out – as basically sweet, but never cloying. I also love the fact that no scene or line is wasted. There’s an economy to their screenwriting and editing that could also be held up to film students. A classic example is the way in which they handle what would conventionally be a montage scene – mixing visuals with audio from another scene – and audio that sounds improvised and natural. And maybe that’s the biggest achievement of all. The Duplass Brothers have taken a caricatured movie situation – ludicrously clingy son sabotages mum’s relationship – and have used that as a hook for dialogue that actually sounds real, and so moves us.

CYRUS played Sundance 2010 and was released earlier this year in the US, Canada, France, Finland and the UK. It opens later this month in Belgium and in November in Russia, Germany and the Netherlands.