The Time Being

a great actor. a strange subject. nuances of atmosphere. all as bones and flesh of a movie who can remember Lucian Freud art or American Beauty.it is a film from images and silence. a kind of parable. or only a lesson.Frank Langella is the locomotive of this interesting project. Sarah Paulson - the delicate spice.Wes Bentley- only a silhouette lost in middle of details. it is a beautiful movie. not exactly good. only beautiful. a kind of embroidery, a precise puzzle, a story about choices, maybe, version of Faust pact. the best ingredient - expectation of viewer. the worse - hope to remark Wes Bentley in a special role. but director intuition remains remarkable - Frank Langella is the best and the others, including the script, may be his mirrors.

Another masterful performance by stage and screen veteran Frank Langella, anchors this visually sumptuous but remote depiction of the relationship that begins when a selfish dying man hires a young struggling artist (Wes Bentley) for a series of enigmatic video assignments. A dull actor with intense eyes, Bentley brings very little energy to his role as a neglectful father and husband consumed by his love for the canvas. As a result, the drama remains tentative until the emotional heart of the film, a character played by Sarah Paulson,arrives towards the finale. The culminating set piece, involving Langella's final gift to his family is devastating in its emotional power and visual simplicity, but over all the film feels more of a cinematic exercise than a satisfying dramatic story.

The Time Being is a meditation and a gentle character study. The director manages to capture a mood without too much dialogue. Frank Langella is as usual masterful in the role of a dying man who commissions a down-on-his-luck painter (Wes Bentley), sending him on strange assignments filming sunrises, sunsets and children playing in a playground. The mystery eventually reveals itself leading the painter to seek balance between his family life and his art. The visuals and production design are stunning as are the transitions of swirling paint in water. I saw this film at the Toronto Film Festival and the audience response was very positive. This is an art-house film that won't disappoint.

So I decided to look up Wes Bentley movies and picked this one to watch because it sounded interesting to me. I'm a sucker for artistic things. The whole vibe of this film was really interesting, it had this strange but at the same time kind of comforting atmosphere. Wes Bentley was great as a struggling artist who loves his family but feels the pressure to provide for them and it puts a strain on his relationshipwithhis wife and son. I'll leave it at that, I don't want to spoil anything. If you're looking for a fast paced movie, this probably isn't for you, but if you enjoy art I feel like it could be.

The only good performance in this movie is Frank Langella. And there are much better films of his to watch. This one reminded me of a student film shot by a film student with little to no talent. The script is mediocre at best. The performances are wooden. There's nothing special about the cinematography. All in all just a big time waster. Its the kind of independent film TV actors make when the show they're making a living off of is on hiatus and they don't want to sit around doing nothing. There is honestly nothing to this film. Its 85 minutes of actors going through the motions. And the actor who played the artist is probably one of the most uninspriring actors of all time. Maybe if we were still in the silent film era a good director could get a good performance out of him just focusing on his eyes. But once he opens his mouth and starts talking. Ugh.