I stumbled across this little piece of fluff on IFC television last night. It had a cast worth checking, so in spite of IFC's unhopeful two star rating, I settled in to watch. What an odd little film.
The actor's performances were good -- very natural in terms of their interactions and relationships. The pace was a tad slow -- while I don't think movies need fist fights and explosions to create pace, a dialog-intensive film needs to beware of ......................... long..................................pauses. Still, that is a minor criticism in my view. If that was the only flaw in the film, I could and would have given it a higher rating because for the most part the actors handled those dialogic gaps pretty well.
The worse problem with this film was its failure in my view to address the fundamental "So what?" question. I was never given any reason to care a whit about any of these characters, with the limited exception of Beth (Bridget Fonda) whom I was hoping would get the hell out of Enfield. After she left, I rooted for her not be found by the pseudo-intellectual painter, Sid. Beth had made a couple of very bad choices, with the amoral Nick (Tim Roth) and the vacuous pop-psychologist, Sid, so I was rooting for her to stick to her guns, enjoy the moments of pleasure she had with Sid, and get away before her brain turned entirely to mush. Either Nick or Sid would have destroyed her: Nick with his amoral outlook and lack of direction; Sid with his pretensions of profundity that he used to shield his fundamental lack of imagination and ambition.
Still, I didn't care a helluva lot about Beth either. She made the right decision (finally), but her escape was not a complete triumph because for all we know she fell into yet another destructive relationship with some other needy weirdo two towns over.
All of these characters, in the end, were drifting along in pointless situations. With a film so lacking in plot, brevity was important and, thankfully, present. If this movie had pushed toward the two-hour mark, it would have been an utter waste of time unless the time had been used to give the viewer a reason to care about this crew of self-indulgent dim-wits.
