Reviews

Good production of a bad story. Well-directed, well-acted, well-written, and beautiful overall production. And I hate it.

Contains its own worst commentary: characters with pointless and unpleasant psychoses serving as metaphors for political insanity of the period. Watching the worst aspects of humanity play themselves out is not entertaining.

Movies like this keep getting made no matter how many metaphorical fingers the audience cuts off of their own metaphorical hands. I suspect if I threaten to stop watching movies like this altogether, they will come and burn my house down. Leave me in peace.

I'm sorry about not being able to save the little asses of the production team that made this razor-blade bannister of a movie, but it's not my fault that I can't stomach stuff like this.

The soapy plot provides what may have been intended to be drama, but was instead a contrivance. For almost every scene, you could feel the actors trying to internalize the situation and improvise, almost as if they had read the description of that scene only that morning and were trying to assimilate their characters into it instead of the other way around. The movie kind of has that feel of being written as it is shot, and though this can sometimes cause an actor to grow into their part right before our eyes (and therefore project character growth), it instead is put together like a series of scenes in which these static characters find themselves. There is nothing about the characters that we find out in the course of this movie that we couldn't have guessed right from the beginning. That is, despite the intention of mining character-study type drama from what should be a character-driven dramatic situation, it becomes instead what feels like a bullet-point presentation on the character's reactions to it.

The drinking scene is wonderful, and also the scene of the three of them discussing Iris's conquests. The improvised dialogue absolutely works in these situations, and guides the character portraits in interesting directions. Unexplored and ultimately useless directions, but directions nonetheless. The scenic montage at the end of the movie is nicely done for the situation it portrays, not the least reason because there is very little of the absurdly inauthentic dialogue that plagues the rest of the movie.

Emily Blunt is good as a young widow, but it's not the visceral type of performance you might expect from a movie like this where deep primal feelings are supposedly explored and vented. The tone is oddly light and airy, and the actors may have picked up on that, or they may have caused it. Mark Duplass is particularly reluctant to allow his character to feel more than one thing at once, and it's difficult to tell if it's because the overall tone of the movie veers into melodrama or because he just doesn't believe in his character enough to give him any depth.

Don't get me wrong, this is a very pleasant movie to watch. Blunt is pretty, Duplass has some amusing moments, and DeWitt has a very watchable awkwardly nihilistic manner about her. Usually, with aspects like these, combined with beautiful scenery, a movie isn't tough to get through. But don't expect much else.

--- Spoiler Alert --- As an example of the superficiality of the tone, the only hint of the internal conflict in Iris upon confessing that she's in love with her dead husband's brother is when she says, "Is that weird?" This is a stupendously unsatisfactory line that is delivered as if she were saying she prefers kale over cabbage. From the plot to this point, we are led to believe that there should be other unexpressed conflicted feelings underneath, but there apparently aren't. And because we don't believe and aren't led to understand what is driving her to this conclusion, we can't really buy any of it.