BEFORE: I've circled back to another film from Nicole Holofcener, who directed "Lovely & Amazing", which opened the week. Now I'm tempted to skip a day so I can also end the week with a film from the same director. I've got to get up early tomorrow (on a SATURDAY?) for a shift at the movie theater, but it will be the end of thesis week, then I get a bit of a break. So here's the plan, I need to figure out the path to Father's Day ASAP - maybe like three times so far this year I've been stuck, came to dead ends in the chain, and the solution was to split off a film from the herd - like the way I split off "The Pale Blue Eye" from the other Christian Bale films, and that allowed me to move forward. So I strongly suspect, with a Jude Law chain coming up, that if I split one of those films from the others, it will create a path from Memorial Day to Father's Day. It's funny, but over 15 years I've learned to sense these things. If I'm right, then I'll have a hole in the line-up, I can skip Saturday and then THIS will be my last film for the week, and I therefore won't stay up too late tonight, and I won't oversleep. In theory, anyway.
Bill Camp and Elizabeth Marvel carry over from "News of the World". I happen to know that they're married to each other. Is it weird that I know that they're married to each other?
THE PLOT: After leaving his wife and his job to find happiness, Anders befriends a drug-addicted teen, sending him down a path of reckless and shameful behavior.
AFTER: Yeah, there's definitely some DNA shared here, between this film and "Lovely & Amazing", even though that film was all about a mother and three daughters, and this one's about a divorced man finding his way in the world. Both movies are absolutely FILLED with awkward moments, and cases where the main characters can't help but sabotage their own lives. I just kind of get a feeling that's what Holofcener prefers to tell stories about - remember, she also directed "Walking & Talking", "Friends with Money" and "Enough Said". So, if you're a film studies student looking for an idea for your own thesis, consider Nicole Holofcener's collective body of work, and I've just given you all you need to get started on it. You're welcome.
Anders Harris is the recently divorced man who's also given up his Wall Street job, the daily commute up to... Tarrytown, is it? But even though he moved out of the family home and sort of "given" it to his wife in the divorce, he also stopped paying the mortgage a few months back and he hasn't told her that, which, umm, is not cool. But NITPICK POINT, don't you think she should have been told this? Wouldn't the bank or mortgage company try to send notices to the address of the house, trying to collect? If you just got divorced and your spouse moved out, wouldn't that be the FIRST THING you would think about each month, whether the mortgage is being paid? I just don't see any responsible human living in a house for six months without making sure that the bills are being paid. (Then again, I know somebody who stopped paying their mortgage and didn't tell their spouse, and the spouse didn't figure it out until too late. No names here - but I guess I have to admit that it could happen. Still, not a cool thing to do.)
Anders doesn't quite know where he fits in, now - he goes to the neighborhood Christmas party, but doesn't want to hang out with his ex-wife, and he certainly doesn't feel comfortable hanging out with the other financial execs, so instead he goes outside and encounters the stoner teenagers. Worse, he takes a hit of what they're smoking before asking what exactly it is. Big mistake, kids today are into smoking some pretty weird stuff, and it apparently hits hard. One of those kids takes a bit too much and ends up in the hospital. Anders goes to visit him and brings him a gift, but really, it's a bad idea to become friends with someone your own son's age. It's not going to work - I work with a bunch of twenty somethings at my job, and jeez, I can't really be that buddy-buddy with them, because we're from different generations. And I wonder if they just see me as that washed-up loser in his fifties who's still getting paid by the hour somehow.
(I may go drinking with a younger crowd, but I can't see myself doing drugs with a bunch of teens. My pot-infused chocolate bar purchase two months ago was a bust, I never felt high no matter how many of the chocolate squares I ate. I either got ripped off, or I have superhuman tolerance for cannabis.)
Anders feels bad about not paying the mortgage (well, he should...) and tries to borrow money from a friend, who takes him to a strip club. There in the club, he meets a woman, Barbara, and they hit it off and share a cab home. Later, he arranges a date with Barbara, but the movie's not long enough to really get into whether that's going to be a long-term relationship. Meanwhile, Anders' son, who works for his ex-wife, gets terminated after he takes money from one of her students and uses it to enter a poker game. His son seems like a real chip off the old block. The son, Donny, later gets a job delivering for a liquor store, and he manages to screw all that up, too. Plus he's living out of his car, because both parents believe he's too old to live with them. This is kind of NITPICK POINT #2, because if you're a parent, and your child is an adult but has no place to live, would you really let him live in his CAR instead of in your house? I mean, yes, he should be living on his own, but if he can't swing that, wouldn't you cut him a break and at least let him live in your basement or garage? Times are tough, you know.
Then that kid from the party who overdosed is about to go to rehab, but before he does he goes to visit Anders to see if Anders will take care of his pet turtle. Anders makes another bad choice, he does drugs AGAIN with this kid - jeezus, when is ANDERS going to start acting like an adult, he keeps making one bad decision after another, and doing drugs with a kid who's on his way to rehab kind of takes the cake here - this whole film is just one lapse of bad judgment after another. Nobody can seem to break out of the behavior patterns that they're accustomed to, or they're all just so tired of life that they just don't care any more, or have any sense of what's right or wrong. Humans, in other words.
There's a scene late in the movie where everybody comes clean - not sober clean, just honest with each other - and this kind of reminded me of the later scenes in "Secrets & Lies" where everyone's private pain and mistakes got exposed at that birthday party. Anders and his ex-wife and her new boyfriend have a talk with Sophie and Mitchell, the parents of the drug-addicted Charlie, and it all comes out, everyone's secrets are exposed and everyone is mad at everyone else, and nobody ends up cutting anybody else any slack. Well, why would they?
I'm not quite sure what the point of this all is. Everything in everyone's life changed, that's for sure, and who can say if it all changed for the better or for the worse? Well, OK, definitely worse for Charlie's family, but other than THAT, who can say? Anders is apparently in a relationship with Barbara and he has a pet turtle now. Donny goes to school in New York City and Anders' ex-wife sells the house and plans her next wedding to take place in Hawaii. Life goes on, but is that the only greater truth that gets stated here? I'm just not sure. I guess we're all destined to have a mid-life crisis at some point, and we're all just not going to see the twists and turns in our lives that it might bring us. Is THAT the point?
Also starring Ben Mendelsohn (last seen in "Animal Kingdom"), Edie Falco (last seen in "Freedomland"), Thomas Mann (last seen in "Blood Father"), Michael Gaston (last seen in "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks"), Charlie Tahan (last seen in "The Pale Blue Eye"), Josh Pais (last seen in "Scream 3"), Connie Britton (last seen in "Promising Young Woman"), Natalie Gold (last seen in "Rough Night"), Victor Slezak (last seen in "Too Big to Fail"), Victor Williams, Mary Catherine Garrison (last seen in "Moonlight Mile"), Annabella Rosa, Joe Allanoff, Antonio Ortiz (last seen in "Vox Lux"), Georgia Ximenes Lifsher (last seen in "Hustlers"), Rao Rampilla (last seen in "Isn't It Romantic"), Richard Lublin, Jordan Baker, Macc Plaise, Menachem Rosenblatt, Andy Prosky (last seen in "Up Close & Personal"), Peter Brensinger, Andre B. Blake (last seen in "I Think I Love My Wife"), Tia Dionne Hodge, Sarah Wilson.
RATING: 5 out of 10 toothbrush holders
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