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| (www.ew.com) |
- Also Known As:
- Unknown
- Version:
- needed to precede following dl
- Languages:
- Length:
- 93 minutes (Uncut)
- Review Format:
- DVD
- Year:
- 2014
- Country:
- Predominant Genre:
- Comedy
- Director:
- Outstanding Performances:
- Premiss:
- Middle-aged couple’s career and marriage are overturned when a disarming young couple enters their lives.
- Themes:
- Advertising | Alienation | Art | Curative | Destiny | Emotional repressionFamily | Friendship | Identity | Individualism | Loneliness | Love | Loyalty | Materialism | Narcissism | Nostalgia | Personal | Personal change | Political | Political Correctness | Preventive | Propaganda | Schizophrenia | Society | Solipsism | Stereotyping | Western world | White culture
- Similar to:
- Unknown
Amusing, poker-faced comedy about White culture’s lack of substance; springing from discussing life rather than actually living it.
Computer-programmed life stages entail a White scrabble to keep-up with friends (the Joneses) - regardless of ability. This play-acting becomes their only substantive life goal.
The fragmentary understanding of the world presented here reflects a hermetically-sealed culture that is more of a psychic trap than a serious source of genuine identity. With no-one of substance to help one grow and mature, Whites flounder in an abyss that conflates the Personal with the Political; renewing their youth through their children in middle-age - when they run out of anything else to do.
The central couple’s lack of children leaves them with nothing to aspire to; their culture offering them little solace here other than the pretense of making friends with younger, more parasitic versions of themselves. There then emerges an enervating tension between feeling left behind one’s contemporaries versus the personal utility of dolce far niente.
That the persona is not the same as the character is not dramatically explored here to any degree; leaving the characters with a sexual relationship that is not based so much on shared values as it is on shared cultural references; encouraging the personal laziness that marks the breakdown of any significant relationship, along with the implication that if one spends time with others just like oneself, one will find one’s complement. But this only leads to finding one’s mirror, followed by the inevitable White whining when such relationships eventually fail.
The movie contains some great performances, particularly from Adam DRIVER & Naomi WATTS; acting the part of people acting parts in their own lives; their characters lacking the innate talent to do anything other than play the social games that make them appear talented. But they are the blind leading the blind; recording - through their documentarian careers - a world they fear to live in fully because they lack the experience to understand it.
The director is clearly the new Woody Allen - but with a more serious edge - who still has not, like his characters, understood the political context of his own work and life.
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