This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Mitch Capps’s review published on Letterboxd:
This review may contain spoilers.
This is a coming-of-age movie about a grown man, Joe, who has three college aged children. His development went under arrest even as it appeared to experience an unprecedented acceleration when he began a relationship with a pet shop employee, Gracie, in her late thirties which resulted in jail time and pregnancy. They later married and became a fixture of tabloids and finally an independent film starring Elizabeth who is visiting the family as research for her role.
Look at all the COA tropes throughout the film. A love interest is introduced into a tender hearted protagonist’s life which has him rethinking his identity. Typically it will have him developing tension with his parental figure, in this case his wife, and trying new experiences (smoking pot, one night stand), and finally culminates into a big life change that the story has been building towards (normally he might be going to college, but here—again—it’s his children…an empty nest) and there are hints of reconciliation with his regular life and a wink towards the departing interloper’s impact on him.
So as a twist on the genre this is quite a creative achievement. More on genre, it obviously wants to interact with the Lifetime movie style that would ordinarily take on such a soapy human interest story and nothing speaks to this more than its main theme by Michel Legrand and additional score by Marcelo Zarvos. I call it “mystery piano” and I’m crazy about it. It is a mystery too. And a romance.
It’s possible that leaning in as dramatically as they did on the music was just being self aware. In any case, when the note first hit and then Gracie says “I think we need more hot dogs” I did laugh. Because of the premise of the movie I did not think the laughter would persist, but it did. Which brings us to at least a third in a series of genre bends: satire/comedy. I laughed out loud several times. These were not belly laughs, but chuckles—still consistent enough to realize the writing and direction were cheeky. I wish I had written down the moments because I’ve struggled to point them out to others in conversation afterwards. If I’m right and these were intentional it is a wickedly sly comedy.
Thematically, the film is an invitation to consider and confess the depths of your suffering and sin before it destroys you and others. Gracie is incredulous when Elizabeth describes regret to her: “So you just sit there and you think about your history and behavior?” Sadly, any genuine self-reflection that Elizabeth does fails to translate into any discernibly positive change.
The fact is, both characters (by the way, both portrayed by Academy award winning actresses) are depicted as predators. Joe is their prey. From his angle the chief genre is tragedy. Sexual immorality is fractal. It is incompatible with the Spirit. Gracie develops and perpetuates a character and a story to protect herself from the weight of her sins. The tabloids help her in this. Elizabeth gives a monologue about how, when filming a sex scene the line between what’s real and not becomes blurred. She develops the character and the story to give her a kind of twisted access to sin. Be careful how you choose your roles.
A very layered and deep movie that seems to have pulled off the minor miracle of entering a creative vacuum. That’s probably why there’s so much to think about and talk about here.
