Movie Review: Juliet, Naked (2018)

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High Fidelity, About a Boy, and Juliet, Naked author Nick Hornby's characters have always been my kind of people.

Like looking in the mirror, whenever I read his books, in the sentences on the pages staring back at me I see not just myself but my friends, family, crushes, and loves – passionate people Jack Kerouac might've called "the mad ones" – who can talk books, movies, music, art, and life for hours.

And that's exactly what Duncan (Chris O'Dowd) was like when Annie (Rose Byrne) first met him in Jesse Peretz's big screen adaptation of Juliet, Naked.

Arriving in her small English seaside community full of ideas from the outside world – the exact same way she had when she returned from university in London to take her dad’s post at a small history museum and care for her younger sister after he grew ill and died – Duncan's passion mirrored her own.

But although the film and media studies professor swept her off her feet early on, now fifteen years later, Annie has started to realize that just like film, she is her boyfriend's second love.

Still hopelessly devoted to early '90s alternative singer/songwriter Tucker Crowe (Ethan Hawke), whose Jeff Buckley meets Jeff Tweedyish breakout breakup album "Juliet" he considers a masterpiece, in his spare time, Duncan has created a shrine to the singer in the couple’s basement as well as a website dedicated to the man and his work.

The ringleader of roughly two hundred middle aged men (as Annie describes in her witty offscreen voice-over), Duncan and his fellow fanatics obsess over Crowe's words and music, while sharing their theories as to where they think he is today after mysteriously walking out of a Minneapolis club two decades earlier in the middle of a set without looking back.

The source of a number of fights between the couple including yet another disagreement when she opens and listens to an obscure cut of the album called "Juliet, Naked" that had been sent to her boyfriend, Annie finally has enough and posts a negative review of "Naked" on his website.

And while it helps precipitate their breakup, ironically this action also winds up causing her to obsess over Tucker as well when the musician sends her an email agreeing with her critique, leading to a back-and-forth correspondence between the two that grows more revealing and flirtatious over time. Fortunately for viewers, gradually life and fate intervenes and the two finally come face-to-face.

Adapted by screenwriters Jim Taylor (Sideways), Tamara Jenkins (The Savages), and Evgenia Peretz (Our Idiot Brother), despite the plot similarities, the utterly charming Juliet, Naked has less in common with the delightfully old-fashioned Pride and Prejudice infused Shop Around the Corner update You've Got Mail and more with both Notting Hill and the two most famous big screen Hornby translations of High Fidelity and About a Boy.

Though obviously a romance in spirit (and just one of several recent releases breathing fresh new life into one of film's very first genres), similar to Marc Turtletaub's 2018 American remake of the Argentine film Puzzle, at its heart, Juliet, Naked is the story of a woman who falls in love and sees herself a bit more clearly when mirrored back in her lover's eyes.

With the Duncan sized obstacle out of her way once and for all, Annie realizes just what it is she does and does not want out of life.

A love letter to Rose Byrne, in Peretz's Juliet, the actress steals the viewer's heart as easily as she always does.

While the passionate dialogue that fills the film's first half drops off a bit in its understandably awkward second half as it's always harder to communicate in person as freely as you had in print, Juliet's vulnerabilities admirably wind up taking us in a direction we did not expect.

Following in the footsteps of other British romantic comedies that fill your screen with irresistibly offbeat characters, Juliet boasts a fine, understated turn from a more laid back than usual Ethan Hawke as well as a terrifically funny O'Dowd, whom, much like Annie is a Hornby character you immediately feel like you know.

As breezy and warm as the nearby seashore, Peretz's Sundance favorite is the film you didn't know you needed to make summer last a little longer.

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Text ©2018, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

DVD Review: Love After Love (2017)

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A flawed system of facial translation, on the wall of every hospital hangs a rudimentary pain scale chart of 1-10 or smile to frown.

Not taking into consideration a person's culture, gender, or background, while on the surface it might appear to do the job, what the emoji system fails to understand is not only are people being seen in hospitals experiencing some of the worst days of their lives but there's no universal guidebook to follow on how to act that's going to apply to all of us.

Whether smiling out of politeness or laughing to keep from crying, we're all just there waiting until the storm passes when we can all go back to our lives.

Only there's no pause button during a tragedy and when we come back, we return to our lives already in progress. Hoping to board that roller coaster once again even though it hasn't actually stopped, we soon realize that we have no clue – not even a 1-10 facial translation chart – how we're supposed to act when we don't make it up that first hill fast enough.

The driving force behind Russell Harbaugh's potent and intensely personal family drama Love After Love, it's precisely this idea of behavior over story and more importantly, how to cope when it all goes wrong that makes this achingly real ensemble piece so compelling to watch.

Setting its biggest scenes (including those that bookend the film) at key family gatherings in a way that recalls both Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters and Eric Rhomer's Autumn Tale, Love After Love lets us into the home and lives of a tight-knit New York family before, during, and after the loss of their beloved patriarch.

Penned by Harbaugh and his mentor, Judy Berlin director Eric Mendelsohn, as well written as it is, Love is less concerned with what its characters, including widowed mother Suzanne (Andie MacDowell) and her two grown sons, the emotionally needy Nick (Chris O’Dowd) and existentially lost Chris (James Adomian) actually say versus what they do and the way they say it.

Performed with gusto by its tremendous ensemble cast (especially a never better MacDowell and bracingly against type O’Dowd), Harbaugh and Mendelsohn respect both the actors and audience enough to skip over scene progressions from breakups to makeups.

Jumping right into the aftermath, they trust that we’ll be able to look past the external scale of 1-10 to see what's really going on. And this approach pays off extremely well in a pivotal second act sequence as Nick – having chased and transferred his affections once again to a new fiancé – brings Suzanne and Chris to the home of his soon to be in-laws for a Christmas party.

Not nearly ready to celebrate such a major holiday with strangers, let alone listen to speeches about marriage by a man of the house who’s not their own, we watch as Suzanne and Chris initially go through the motions of politeness, smiling at the right time and saying all the things you’re supposed to say.

While for Chris the facade soon goes downhill thanks to alcohol, even before we brace for impact, we witness not only the discomfort in Suzanne's eyes but the way she tries to chime in a second too late for it to be genuine (similar to the way we could read between Nick's reactions in act one).

Comparing and contrasting their behavior even more through the inverted mirror images of Nick and his fiancé later followed by Suzanne and her own new love (which inevitably causes a grenade to go off in the relationship between mother and sons), the inventive editing by Matthew C. Hart and John Magary adds a rich layer of subtext to Love After Love.

Not knowing how to act, let alone address the titular double standard that exists for each familial role, rather than face it head on, they instead try making their way up, down, and beyond the facial translation scale as they move through the five stages of grief.

Serving as a terrific showcase for O'Dowd and Adomian as well as a welcome return to substantive parts for the luminous MacDowell, while it's fundamentally Harbaugh's picture, I hope it might also encourage viewers to seek out his co-writer's masterful marvel Judy Berlin.

A veritable feature length extension, evolution, and adaptation of Harbaugh's acclaimed roughly twenty minute short, Rolling On the Floor Laughing, which is included on the DVD, Love was overlooked in its post-festival, limited theatrical run.

Owing to the filmmaker's age as well as his subsequent collaboration with former/fellow wonder boy Mendelsohn, while Love After Love is much more poetic and mature than its predecessor, Harbaugh's interest in the minutiae of visual storytelling and the way that behavior dictates plot is made abundantly clear in Rolling early on.

A chronicle of love after love indeed, although a few of Love's climactic scenes push the dial past authenticity and venture briefly into the realm of the Chekovian stage, Harbaugh's dramatic opus remains just as mesmerizing for those who love theater and literature as much as they do film.

Drawing inspiration from his own life as well as Maurice Pialat’s The Mouth Agape for the film overall, while the true test for Harbaugh will be in whatever he delivers next, on a scale of 1-10, I’m not worried at all.

Text ©2018, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Blu-ray Review: Calvary (2014)

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On Blu-ray and Digital HD 

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Named after the hill by Jerusalem where Jesus was crucified, Calvary, from playwright turned filmmaker John Michael McDonagh begins as a psychologically driven whodunnit thriller before quickly and rather disappointingly devolving into an allegorical, avant-garde version of High Noon.

And while that might sound interesting, ultimately you get the feeling that – at least conceptually – the unorthodox approach utilized by McDonagh would’ve translated much better on the stage of an experimental theatre company than it does on the movie screen.

Surprisingly emotionally frigid given its subject matter, Calvary holds viewers at an arm's length and a long arm at that as we feel even further away from its characters than those who fill the frames of fellow provocateurs Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke.

Yet this time around the sacrificial lamb isn't Jesus as suggested by the title, nor a woman as is so often the case in von Trier's work, but instead a by-all-accounts good priest named Father James (Brendan Gleeson), who had joined the church later in life following the death of his wife.

Nonetheless, in Calvary's startling opener, the life of Father James is threatened in the confessional by an unseen parishioner who informs him that he'll be killed as symbolic payback for the sins of an evil man of the cloth who'd raped the victim as a child every other day for five years.

Told he has one week to get his house in order, the unflinchingly calm and determined voice of the parishioner never wavers for a moment before he leaves the confessional with the promise that they’ll meet again—for the final time – on the beach near the hill the following Sunday (in a setting that subtly acknowledges the symbolic title).

Conflicted by the sanctity of the seal of confession and the horrors endured by the victim, James is further troubled by the realization that – given the man's voice and his closeness to the community – he knows precisely who threatened him from word one.

As Calvary alludes from the start, there are far more than a mere Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse that roam this otherwise sleepy little (albeit spiritually bankrupt) seaside Irish village.

Every character it seems is a victim, a villain, and/or a witness, and as McDonough takes us on what is purported to be a tour through the father’s seven stages of grief, we ascertain that every single one of its inhabitants (including the Father himself) is suffering from one or another form of PTSD obtained from a cruel twist of life – if not fate.

And this conclusion is only reaffirmed upon the arrival of another walking ghostlike figure in the form of the man's own, grown battle-scarred daughter, Fiona (played by Kelly Reilly), who appears on scene after traveling by train like a character out of a classic western.

Visiting her father to convalesce following a failed suicide attempt brought on by the never explained actions of an unknown man (which serves as a thematic metaphor around which the entire film revolves), Fiona is as troubled as the rest.

Asking us to question issues surrounding the film's major obsessions of culpability, guilt innocence beyond their legal limits and definitions, McDonagh takes his thought-provoking setup and then proceeds to suck the life out of it as we encounter one over-the-top character after another in a production that is as existential it is nonsensical.

Boasting shock-filled monologues about everything from cannibalism to the desire to kill women as revenge for being a virgin as well as urinary vandalism and the offscreen slaughter of a pet, the abysmal characters we encounter along with Father James all battle to suck the life out of him as well like the allegorical vampires that they are.

Having completely overdosed on symbolism; by the time the screen fills with the orange hue of arson and our protagonist shouts up to the heavens "why didn't anybody see?" before another deliberately closes their eyes, we've begun to wonder if there's any viewer left watching Calvary that doesn't desperately want to do the same.

Although he starts out strong in a dark, barely lit corner from where he proceeds to shine a spotlight on religious, moral and existential hypocrisy, McDonagh begins losing his religion as the film continues.

Thus, despite a potent turn by Gleeson and the rest of Calvary's impressive though poorly utilized ensemble cast, Calvary suffers from a crisis of narrative faith that prevents it from following in the footsteps of other filmmakers who found their work at a similar crossroads but dared to venture on full speed ahead.

What could’ve had the potency of superior subgenre efforts such as Doubt, Priest, In the Name Of, The Jewish Cardinal, and/or Philomena as well as the power a two-man Sam Shepard play begins to crucify itself with excess as soon as the Father ventures beyond the parish’s walls.

Intriguingly, Calvary filmmaker John Michael McDonagh is the brother of In Bruges writer/director Martin McDonagh. And while it's evident that together and separately the two have an awful lot to say about priests as similar scenarios of churchly violence also occur in Bruges, if right now we were asked to follow just one filmic gospel involving Catholic anarchy and hypocrisy – I’d still have to go with Bruges – six years after its release in 2008.

An artistic free for all, Calvary may be gorgeously shot but it plays like an Irish Catholic avant-garde interpretation of High Noon as seen through the eyes of an unlikely trinity comprised of Haneke, von Trier, and David Lynch.

Instead of a dramatic mystery about forgiveness and revenge, Calvary is undone by its devotion to symbolic allegory as well as its old time religion-like love of fire and brimstone level speechifying. Thus, despite its predictable yet admittedly poignant conclusion, try as it might it, McDonagh just can't convert us into cinematic believers.

   

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.