It is a bigger canvas with more characters than Starting Out in the Evening, which I believe to be a masterpiece, and this is adapted by the same novelist and director. The NYC relationship ensemble is a tradition in film, about upper class writers, publishers, intellectuals, their lives in shambles. They always have that sole articulate black intellectual.
The film is dated by about ten years when this genre was all the rage in indie film. It shows how the landscape has changed in independent film that it only has 200 views on letterboxd, with a cast like that (and the top reviews here straight up graffiti...)
Still, the movie is a magic trick. Once you get to know the characters, it plays you in interesting ways.
Shaloub is the writer this time, he is a toxic narcissist. Hunter, she becomes stranded by happiness and seems lost and one-dimensional. Milioti is obsessed with dating the least interesting man in the world and exists only to be his sex mommy. (I like how she is teaching a class and she looks no older than anyone there.) This is basically the worst group of people to focus a movie around, and maybe that says something about the randomness of existence.
Because there is all this movement, as the melodrama unfolds everything we assumed was wrong.
Milioti falls into post-partum depression that is as terrifying as her manic pixie was uplifting. Her boyfriend we expect will be haunted the whole film, ends up becoming sensible. Shaloub begins, almost monstrous, but you find a weird respect for him.
The movie sets up these characters and takes them on a journey, and therein is its pleasure.
What it lacks is Starting Out's myth-making, a film that makes the audience feel like geniuses because it is putting down so much psychic drama that reads perfectly to us. Maybe there is something to be said about that film's silence too, here every ugly thought is expressed, becoming an alienating experience.
In fact, this feels like how Starting Out in the Evening talked about author Langella's flops, clouded, less definite, more real to a fault.
Still there is a journey on screen that resonates, nothing stands still across the film. Then its ending.
1- The theater director's fake play wins acclaim.
2- His wife knows because she knows.
3- His intent is to step into the spotlight because art exists beyond its author.
His gobbledy guck logic becomes redemptive. This to me is a spiritual point about how there is no distinction between the swimmer, and the current. It's not real? Well when was theater and storytelling ever real to begin with?
This has an impact of breaking the fourth wall to invite us into its celebration as the audience, of art, melodrama, and our own flawed lives. Like I said, it is a magic trick. I hope they make a third.
