4 hours ago
4
Here is a quite unbearable curation of first-world problems starring Amy Adams from screenwriter Kata Wéber and her husband, director Kornél Mundruczó. They are film-makers who have given us challenging and interesting material in the past; now they pivot to a solemn, narcissistic tale, couched in self-forgiving, self-adoring rhetoric, all about upper-middle-class artistic folk in the US, yearning for wellness and recovery in their lovely Cape Cod home. It’s a movie which invites its audience to believe in the alleged talent and importance of its artistic characters, and also extend submissive empathy to their inter-generational psychic wounds.
Adams plays Laura, the grownup daughter of a supposedly brilliant dance company director, now dead and remembered in epiphanic childhood memory-glimpses, a genius who had close-cropped grey hair, a black polo neck and functioning alcoholism. Laura inherited his dance passion and his boozing, and now runs his world-renowned company with an uncertain hand; she has just returned from rehab after drunk-driving and crashing while her young son Felix (Redding Munsell) was in the car. Thank heavens they weren’t hurt! You can spend the entire film expecting a flashback to this dramatic event which might show Laura in a bad light – or an interesting one. But no.
Shame, healing and personal growth in a lovely setting are the order of the day. Her artist husband Martin (Murray Bartlett) – we are supposed to believe his paintings are good – is angry yet concerned, and their teen daughter Josie (Chloe East) (also a super-talented dancer of course) is angry and hurt. Wealthy friend George (Rainn Wilson), a business sponsor of the company, supplies the angry-yet-concerned combo, while Laura’s witty gay assistant Peter (Dan Levy) is angry-and-concerned at the way she has neglected the company while on her secret rehab stint. Martin had claimed her absence was a research trip among the Indigenous dancers of Bali, a touch that in a less humourless film might generate some incidental entertainment.
The very first sight we have of Adams’s face is a closeup of her expression of dignified suffering and self-knowledge as she participates in an entirely preposterous drumming-therapy session. It’s basically the default facial expression for the entire film: she will laugh or (at one stage) cry with mortification – having yet again neglected Felix’s wellbeing, allowing him to be stung by jellyfish, and having to be helped out by a dishy recovering addict who now flies kites on the beach. But basically it’s that same deadly serious and solemn expression, which is so far from the brilliant and lively performances that Adams is known for. And to top it all off, they have money worries (not as other mortals know them), and might have to – gasp! – sell the lovely Cape Cod house.
These complacent bores pursue their issues to an uninteresting quasi-catharsis – and Laura and Josie actually do some impromptu modern dance together on the beach. It’s an uncomfortable spectacle.
