I’ve been sitting on this review for a week now, but hell, its time for it to actually get written, since, you know, its a (pretty) good movie and chances are most people are gonna miss it in the cavalcade that are “Zombie Strippers”, the 5000th movie Judd Apatow put out this month and (the miracle that will be) “Harold and Kumar : Escape from Guantamo Bay” (I am actually, 100% seriously, and non-sarcastically looking forward to it, I AM).

Now, however, what we have on our hands here is what some people would call “a comedy of manners” which, when you come to think of it, is a genre that has come to develop solely on the basis of exploiting (at least somewhat, but usually highly) unpleasant people.
As long as these unpleasant people have sharp tongues, and plenty of (sexual, emotional, intellectual) frustration to share, and have cultivated their eccentricities like little bonsai trees, we’re all set. Just ask Noah Baumbach, Woody Allen, Curtis Hanson et al.

So, lets meet the cast: Dennis Quaid is 50ish, widowed, a teacher of literature at Carnegie Mellon, secretly ambitious (with a major sense of self entitlement) and a bitch to be around. Which probably explains why the only people that are ever around him are his over-achieving, repressed-in-every-other-but-intellectual-way daughter (played by Juno aka Ellen Page, who is about to be typecast as the only teenager that can read in Hollywood), his smart but resigned son, and now, after Quaid has an accident that renders him without a license for six whole months, his half brother (Thomas Haden Church) who, and they want you to see this very clearly, is probably the smartest of the bunch and therefore the biggest fuck-up (cue: THE POT as the life destroying device of choice).

Anyway, son, who is in the dorms, they’re all living together in a house that serves as a shrine to the mother and wife that is no longer there.
None of them interact with actual human beings, until Sarah Jessica Parker, as Quaid’s doctor (and old student, still harboring an inexplicable crush on the man who “made her change her major from English to Biology”) infiltrates.

Now, definitely at least 40 (nothing wrong with that, just wanted to make sure), Parker is still playing the free spirit (a variation of her Sandee character in “LA Story”) everywhere she goes. She is a medical doctor here, but the hair is still girlishly long, the coats are still charmingly youthful, and she has some major commitment issues that could rival those of some character she may have played on this little show called “Sex and the city”. Are you maybe familiar with it?

(side note: my father, otherwise a pretty tolerant man, REFUSED to go see this movie because Sarah Jessica Parker is in it….he then called her “ugly, stupid, annoying and an abomination to anything female” and I do swear that I have never in my life heard him feel this strongly about anything on any screen.)

Its all kinda formulaic from there: Sarah and Thomas serve as catalysts for Dennis and Ellen. They allow them to become emotional again, to laugh and cry again, to perk up that little bit of dead soul they have been harboring inside since they were left to fend for themselves.
There is witty banter (Ellen: You should really make your bed. It sets the tone for the day. Thomas: How do you know, what kind of tone I want to set?), and a lot of anecdotal story development that allows all the actors to spread their comedic timing wings as far as they want in cold Pittsburgh (incidentally, also the location of the very similar and slightly less flawed (unless we count the presence of Katie Holmes) “Wonder boys”)

It all goes up, then down, and ends on a pretty positive, hopeful (especially if you are misanthropic) note.
It is a pleasant enough 2 hours to spend with some unpleasant people, and while you don’t really HAVE TO go see it in the theatres, once the DVD is out it will fit neatly in between that copy of “Margot at a Wedding” and “Hannah and her sisters” on your movie shelf.

Ta-dah!

 Send to a Friend