BEFORE: Jessica Alba carries over from "A.C.O.D.", and I think I'm back to typical Hollywood rom-coms, again. Just a few more days of unbearable slapstick and unlikely coincidences, and I can move on to something else - you can probably tell I'm desperate for that. Perhaps I should have just linked from that other Jessica, Jessica Biel, from "Elizabethtown" to "Cellular" and moved on from there. But then I would have had a larger gap to fill between Nicolas Cage films and Easter, also I would have been pushing off about 11 romance films until next year - and really, I'm all for crossing off a few more of these, because it means I'll never have to pass this way again, not with these clunker films anyway.
Eyes on the prize, remember that we've got the Oscars coming up, and my Easter film. Here's the TCM "31 Days of Oscar" line-up of films for tomorrow, March 10:
6:15 am "The Dot and the Line" (1965)
6:30 am "7 Faces of Dr. Lao" (1964)
8:30 am "The Wonderful World of The Brothers Grimm" (1962)
11:00 am "The Great Race" (1965)
2:00 pm "Grand Prix" (1966)
5:15 pm "The Dirty Dozen" (1967)
8:00 pm "The Longest Day" (1962)
11:15 pm "A Man for All Seasons" (1966)
1:30 am "Cleopatra" (1963)
5:45 am "America America" (1963)
I can only claim 4 out of these 10: "The Great Race", "The Dirty Dozen", "A Man for All Seasons" and "Cleopatra" - we all agree, those are the best four, right? Now I'm at 42 out of 111, which is still 37%, where I seem to be stuck.
THE PLOT: A drama about a Cambridge poetry professor who begins to re-evaluate his life of Byronic excess.
AFTER: Eh, this one had a little bit of promise, because it's about a free-wheeling, non-committal English lit professor who (eventually) learns to settle down and have a family. But it's a LONG twisty way to get there, and it doesn't quite happen how he expected it to - that's just life, though, right? Nobody has a road map, and it's almost like everybody's making it up as they go along. So maybe this rings true, a bit, except for the parts that are totally out of bounds and completely unbelievable.
Teachers sleeping with their students, which I thought was a big society no-no, keeps coming back in this year's romance chain, for some reason. This was last seen as a plot point in "Carrie Pilby" (just in flashbacks, though) I could have SWORN this appeared in another film this year, too, and I don't mean that woman in "Happy-Go-Lucky" flirting with her driving instructor. Was it "Iris" I was thinking of? Iris Murdoch slept with so many people, there must have been a few students mixed in there somewhere. Or was it "A Rainy Day in New York"? Anyway, it's been quite a year for large age differences between partners, too - like in "The French Dispatch", "An Education", "How Stella Got Her Groove Back", "The Diary of a Teenage Girl", "Effie Gray", "Carrington", and "Ammonite". I simply MUST remember to point this out again in the year-end round-up.
(Also, two films this week featuring people scattering the ashes of a relative, "Elizabethtown" and this one. Pure coincidence.)
Anyway, Richard's an older professor who likes the younger students - hey, who doesn't? And maybe it's not as illegal or unethical in the U.K. as it is here, because here in the U.S. that sort of thing always seems to end with somebody shooting somebody else. He gets into a six-month relationship with Kate, an American student who suddenly drops the bomb one day that she's got a great job waiting for her back in the States - oh, yeah, and she's pregnant, too. Note that she tells him this shortly after he accidentally hits on her sister, Olivia. To be fair, he met her in a bar and didn't know she was Kate's sister. Still, he did hit on a stranger, then, which is almost just as bad. And for some reason we're not supposed to hold Richard accountable for this, because he learned about love and romance from his father, who also taught English poetry, and apparently Lord Byron and those other guys couldn't keep it in their pants either, and encouraged everybody to just go out and spread the love around.
So, Richard begrudgingly heads for California, which would be a paradise if he didn't have to work at some crappy state college where the students don't even pay attention to him. He's trying to apply for a job at the University of Los Angeles (which I don't even think is a real school) but to do that, he needs his green card, and to get the green card, he's got to stay married to Kate, which is fine right up until the point where Kate says she's met somebody else. Whoops, time for a new plan. In these cases one might naturally fall back on the advice of the great love songs of the 1960's, like when Crosby, Stills & Nash suggested "If you can't be with the one you love, then wait and see if maybe her sister's available." I think that's how the song went, anyway.
Actually, what he does first is what anybody might do if their marriage falls apart - move out. Only he gets to move into the two-story fully decorated pool house in back of the main house, so he can still be near his son, and also shag any female students who are looking to get better grades. Gee, why don't most people think of doing this when their marriage falls apart? It sounds pretty sweet. Oh, right. Kate's got a new live-in boyfriend, and it's not that long before Olivia catches HER husband in bed with someone else, perfectly setting up a reason for her to move to L.A. and look for a way to get over her divorce. Geez, it sure seems like a natural fit.
Except of course, that everything goes wrong instead. There's still that pesky green card to get, Richard's got to qualify for that better teaching position, so it would be a terrible time to accidentally mix post-dental surgery painkillers with alcohol and then operate a motor vehicle. Completing a 10-week series of A.A. meetings, while preparing for his fake green card interview, all while trying to complete the switchover from dating one sister to another AND his father's in town for a visit to boot! What a wacky set of circumstances that some screenwriter threw into the mix!
It's quite a lot to handle, naturally, and it pushes Richard to the breaking point - but, also, it made me not like him, and that was a problem. Sure, I get that he loves his son and wants to stay close to him, but defrauding immigration officials is a serious offense, so is driving while under the influence. Maybe, DON'T have him do those things if you want him to remain a sympathetic character? Also, he hides his relationship with Olivia from his (technically) still-current wife Kate, and that's bad for several reasons. Sleeping with his sister-in-law is bad, but not disclosing it is even worse. And then the way he chooses to "FIX" everything when it all falls apart is also, of course, quite illegal. No spoilers here for the solution, but the U.S. has immigration laws in place for good reasons, at the end of the day.
Narratively speaking, this film is a big mess, it's one complicated situation after another, and it's bound to get worse before it gets better. Even if Richard can get back to the U.S. and what, marry his sister-in-law, re-start the Green Card application (or just cross out "Kate" on the application and pencil in "Olivia"?) what then? He'll be married to his son's aunt, so he'll be an uncle and father to the same boy, and Olivia will be both his aunt and his step-mom? That's bound to be quite confusing.
Also starring Pierce Brosnan (last seen in "Seraphim Falls"), Salma Hayek (last seen in "House of Gucci"), Malcolm McDowell (last seen in "Bad Reputation"), Ben McKenzie (last seen in "The Report"), Duncan Joiner, Merrin Dungey (last seen in "CHIPS"), Fred Melamed (last seen in "A Serious Man"), Ivan Sergei, Marlee Matlin (last seen in "What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?", Lombardo Boyar (last seen in "Bad Santa 2"), Lee Garlington (last seen in "Some Kind of Wonderful" - NICE!), Paul Rae (last seen in "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs"), Eric Passoja, Robert Mailhouse, Lindsey Sporrer, Seth Morris, Taylor John Smith (last seen in "Almost Friends"), Alex Sgambati (last seen in "Love, Simon"), David Saucedo, Elizabeth Anweis, Marianne Muellerleile (last seen in "Smokin' Aces"), Bonnie Hellman (last seen in "For Keeps?"), Juliet Mills, Vaughn Wilkinson (last seen in "Straight Outta Compton"), Sandy Martin (last seen in "Dumbo" (2019)), Brandi Burkhardt, Paul Fox (last seen in "Ford v Ferrari"), Oliver Bell, Makena Taylor.
RATING: 4 out of 10 curse words, arranged alphabetically
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