BEFORE: This is not just a link to get me closer to my Summer Rock Concert/Rockumentary chain, it's also the third film I'm watching this year directed by Noah Baumbach. I could have linked here directly after "While We're Young", which shared two actors with this film, but that might have gotten me to the music docs a bit too soon - and, hey, look at how many films I squeezed in between that other Baumbach film and this one, that's another 17 films off the list!
Elizabeth Marvel carries over from "Gifted". Back on Netflix for this one, I'll be spending a lot of time streaming stuff for the rest of the summer.
AFTER: I've seen this thing quite a few times already this year - the smart or very talented father, who's also been a college professor, is dying and/or getting older, and his death or illness has an effect on his adult kids, and then all the family secrets come out. Let's see, that describes "Proof", "Kodachrome", "Winter Passing", "One True Thing" - also "Beginners" and "Wish I Was Here", if I remember correctly. Again, those were all watched THIS YEAR by me, so I suspect that screenwriters are running out of ideas for dramas, and are just repeating the same ideas over and over - or perhaps they all have daddy issues themselves. Anyway, I'm about to get off of narrative films for the next month and a half, because I'm really in need of something different.
When I watched "The Squid and the Whale", another of Baumbach's films, I thought it felt very Wes Anderson-like, which I chalked up to the fact that the two men were co-writers on "The Life Aquatic" and "The Fantastic Mr. Fox", but now I think it's all just part of Baumbach's style, which seems to fall somewhere between Wes Anderson and Woody Allen. On the whole, that's not a bad place to be. This film reminds me somewhat of "The Royal Tenenbaums", because every character is neurotic and the family has a father who toggles between dotty and dictatorial. And the complicated extended NYC family also reminds me a bit of "Hannah and Her Sisters", which is my favorite Woody Allen film, so putting that film together with something "Royal Tenenbaum"-like is almost right where I'd want a film to land.
It takes a little while to unravel this complicated family, since there are three adult children - Danny, Jean and Matthew - and they keep calling each other half-brothers and half-sister. Danny seems to be the oldest, followed by Jean and then Matthew's the more successful accountant in the family, while Danny's an ex-musician and Jean never really gets to say what she does for a living, some kind of facilitator but even the other family members don't understand her job. Danny and Jean are Harold's children from his first wife, while Matthew's the son of his second wife, and Harold's now married to his third wife. Perhaps this sort of thing is all too common in today's families, especially the famous ones, but it seems like a nightmare to keep everyone straight, even within the family. And the family members here have cousins and in-laws that they've never met, largely because Matthew lives in L.A., where he does accounting for rock stars so they don't end up spending all of their money.
(Unfortunately, I found it confusing that Ben Stiller plays the youngest sibling, because he SEEMS like the oldest, and in fact, the actor is the oldest of the three. So it took me a while to realize his character was the youngest, because it seemed out of step with reality.)
I was joking the other day about how if everything went well at "Jurassic Park", then you wouldn't have much of a movie. Similarly, if everyone in a family was well-adjusted, in stable relationships, and very easygoing about coming to terms with their parents' impending mortality and also their own, then you wouldn't have much of a family drama, either. You'd probably wonder why the filmmaker chose to tell a story about them, since they have no neuroses at all and seem rather boring. So that's why nobody in this movie seems to be able to hold down a relationship for very long, everyone's divorced, on their third spouse, or is probably due to get divorced very soon. It's a somewhat negative view of relationships, but again, these are very disfunctional people.
I approve of most of the points it sort of gets around to making, which are that all films made by people in film school pretty much suck, adults have a hard time dealing with their parents for more than a few days at a time (I know I sure do) and siblings tend to fight over what's best for their parents when it comes to medical and estate issues. The ins and outs of the art museum world, I don't feel I know enough about that to comment on, but the family stuff seems to ring true. Or true-ish, it's just taken pretty far to the extreme.
Also starring Adam Sandler (last seen in "Sandy Wexler"), Ben Stiller (last seen in "While We're Young"), Dustin Hoffman (last seen in "I Heart Huckabees"), Emma Thompson (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Baby"), Grace Van Patten, Candice Bergen (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Rebecca Miller (last seen in "Proof"), Judd Hirsch (last seen in "Independence Day: Resurgence"), Adam Driver (also last seen in "While We're Young"), Sigourney Weaver (last seen in "A Monster Calls"), Michael Chernus (last seen in "The Dinner"), Gayle Rankin (last seen in "The Greatest Showman"), Danny Flaherty (last seen in "The Wolf of Wall Street"), Adam David Thompson (last seen in "A Walk Among the Tombstones"), Ronald Alexander Peet, Matthew Shear (also last seen in "While We're Young"), Sakina Jaffrey, Mandy Siegfried, Josh Hamilton, Justin Winley, with cameos from Jordan Carlos (last seen in "Sleeping With Other People"), Mickey Sumner (last seen in "American Made").
RATING: 6 out of 10 lunch reservations
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