BEFORE: Frances McDormand carries over from "Primal Fear", and will carry over tomorrow as well. I couldn't find a link to this film without breaking up the Edward Norton chain, those are the breaks.
THE PLOT: When an uptight young man and his fiancee move into his libertine mother's house, the resulting clash of life attitudes shakes everyone up.
AFTER: I think I might have sped through this one before, because it's sort of familiar, but not in the way that I remember all the plot points, which would have been a fair indication that I've watched it before, all the way through. Nothing felt memorable, so it's sort of a toss-up, perhaps I watched it but didn't remember anything about it (which does happen from time to time) or I skimmed through it because I was looking for a particular scene, or perhaps I started watching it once and lost interest.
Any of those are possible, because in (re-?)watching it in real time for perhaps the first time, I just felt there wasn't much THERE there. In setting up this whole blogging/movie-watching process, I wonder if I should have perhaps organized things differently, like maybe I'd get more insight by watching a particular director's work in sequence, rather than linking films that share actors. The director of this film, Lisa Cholodenko, also directed "The Kids Are All Right" a few years later, and perhaps if you watch this one and then that one, you can see that she may have learned a few things in between about telling a more engaging story.
Everyone's messed up in their own way, I get that. Maybe it's a California thing, or a lesbian/bisexual thing, or it's just that "train in the distance" thing again. Everybody wants something better, something more, and they trip over themselves or other people on the way to getting it. Here we have a man who's a medical resident with a beautiful girlfriend, but somehow it's not enough, he flirts with a fellow resident that he carpools with. His girlfriend's working on her dissertation, a bookworm who eventually wants to be a social butterfly herself and flirts with whoever's around.
The problems are caused by sharing a house with the man's mother, a record producer who comes from the era of free love, drugs and wild times. There's a band, fronted by her latest boyfriend, who's always hanging around the house because they're trying to finish an album. Personality clashes between the uptight younger people and the free-spirited older people are inevitable, and eventually the younger people have to tell the older people to grow the heck up, or words to that effect.
Of course, it's hypocritical for a character to expect his lover to be faithful to him, when he was thinking of straying himself. But I think calling a film a "character study" is just a euphemism for "we couldn't think of a proper ending". What a cop-out.
Also starring Christian Bale (last seen in "The Machinist"), Kate Beckinsale (last seen in "Total Recall"), Alessandro Nivola (last seen in "American Hustle"), Natascha McElhone (last seen in "Solaris"), Rick Gonzalez, Melissa De Sousa.
RATING: 5 out of 10 bottles of Dom Perignon
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