FilmFemme

Is there anything better than a SearchingOutOldGirlfriends movie?  Well, maybe a Jean-Claude Van Damme double feature, but besides that.

In an instance similar to more recent efforts like The Wrestler, Jim Jarmusch‘s 2005 mid-life drama Broken Flowers  never could have worked without the sensibilities of its star, in this case Bill Murray.  Murray plays Don Johnston, a bachelor successful in life (a vague job having to do with ‘computers’) and unsuccessful in love.  One fateful day, the same day his girlfriend Sherri (Julie Delpy) leaves him, he gets an anonymous letter from an old flame saying that he has a son who is coming to find him.  On the advice of his neighbor, a charmingly enthusiastic Jeffrey Wright, he decides to track down the women he was with in the year this son would have been conceived.  An amateur sleuth, Winston (Wright) promises to piece together the clues and figure out who bore Don’s child.  So he embarks on one of those journeys of self-discovery and visits these women — all of whom are lovely and slightly fucked-up.  Sharon Stone has a hyper-sexualized daughter named Lolita.  When Murray learns this he balks in his unduplicated deadpan and it’s painfully funny.  Down the list is a buttoned up Frances Conroy, who is now married to Shooter McGavin, a timelessly beautiful Jessica Lange who is an animal communicator and employs the cruelly sexy Chloe Sevigny as an assistant and an unrecognizably youthful and brunette Tilda Swinton, the only woman who seems slighted when Don shows up at her doorstep.

Poignant but not schmaltzy, Broken Flowers showcases Murray’s talents in the same way that Wes Anderson plumbed them in Rushmore.  His sad energy is palpable and the wall that he places between himself and the women he encounters fills up the screen.  The movie itself may travel a weathered road, but it goes at the right pace with the right people.

I’ve come to a conclusion.  It’s a big, sweeping, unnecessary conclusion, but as I finished watching Neil LaBute‘s The Shape of Things the other day, it became painfully obvious.  Brace yourself. 

With very few exceptions, I do not like movies based on stage plays.  Good, bad, mediocre.  Well directed with stars or haphazard with unknowns.  It doesn’t matter.  Overwhelmingly, I find them to be uncomfortable exercises in forced intimacy and overacting.  That doesn’t mean some aren’t well done and deserving of praise, but I just don’t like them.  I don’t.  They make me feel icky.

So, it stands to reason that I did not really like The Shape of Things.  Is it an interesting premise?  Sure, it is.  An art student meets a dumpy museum security guard who immediately falls for her.  As he begins to change under her influence, his friends question his well-being while he questions his friends. 

Does it have people I like? Yeah, Rachel Weisz and Paul Rudd are two of my favorites and I think that they are both well-cast here — except for the part where Paul Rudd is supposed to be dumpy. 

Is the directing passable, with creative shots and interesting locales by LaBute, who also wrote and directed it on stage?  Yup.  The setups are compelling, if a bit opaque.

Did I enjoy watching little known Fred Weller play a khaki’d douchebag so convincingly that I would probably never go on a date with him?* Absolutely.

But guess what.

It STILL felt like a stage play that was being forced onto the big screen.  The scenes were staged a little too neatly.  The acting was a little too theatrical.   Gretchen Mol especially didn’t seem able to comprehend this change in mediums as she “projected” and made large and distracting facial expressions, but Weisz fell prey to the same problems.  I was surprised by the ending revelation and it made me uncomfortable – but at least that was the intention in this instance.  I can’t dismiss it as a bad movie, though there were definitely bad parts of it, I just didn’t like watching it. 

It’s sad that no one goes to the theatre anymore, that Broadway shows with big stars are closing left and right, that the most popular stage shows are drivel like “Wicked.” But don’t force me to go to the theatre when I really want to go to the movies.

*Just kidding, I would totally go on a date with him!