NYLON - October 2007 - (Page 111) FILM STRIPS THE GOOD EDITED BY LUKE CRISELL NIGHT WRISTCUTTERS: A LOVE STORY The subject of Wristcutters: A Love Story is a complicated one—suicide and its ramifications—but sadly, and rather unironically, it’s treated with little nuance, understanding, or empathy here. Set in a purgatory for those who’ve offed themselves, where everything is just the same as the real world, only a little bit worse, the film stars Patrick Fugit as Zia, a young guy who slits his wrists after his girlfriend Desiree (Leslie Bibb) leaves him. When Zia learns that Desiree, too, has killed herself, and there’s a possibility they might be reunited in this odd afterlife, he’s determined to find her. Joining him are Eugene (Shea Whigham), who electrocuted himself with his guitar, and whose character is based on Gogol Bordello frontman Eugene Hutz, and Mikal (Shannyn Sossaman), who insists she is there by mistake. The film has its moments, but on the whole, feels like a movie that should have been made in Kevin Smith’s ’90s—back when depression and apathy still seemed cool. KATE WILLIAMS Sweet dreams are not made of this: Jake Paltrow’s feature directorial debut, The Good Night, aims for oneiric wonder but ends up closer to cinematic somnambulism. His film follows sad sack Gary (the U.K. Office’s Martin Freeman), who has been in a successful band and now wastes his talents composing flute-laden schmaltz for TV commercials. At night he escapes into dreams, where a beautiful girl named Anna (Penelope Cruz) lounges around a Philip Johnson-style glass house looking stunning in a white tuxedo jacket and little else. Gary becomes obsessed with spending dreamtime with this mystery woman, which is so much more pleasant than being in the studio or fighting with his shrewish art gallery girlfriend, Dora (the director’s sister, Gwyneth Paltrow). He plugs his ears, dons a sleep mask, covers his bedroom in foam soundproofing, and attends lucid dreaming classes run by bedraggled guru Mel (Danny Devito). And then his acerbic best friend and former bandmate Paul (Hot Fuzz’s Simon Pegg) finds out that Anna is real. It’s not a bad set-up, and the cast is good, but Paltrow’s script and direction lag sleepily behind the talent onscreen. A mock-doc prologue featuring Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker is disorienting, and is largely abandoned until the end. Dora is unsympathetic, Anna is simply an obscure object of desire, and while Freeman’s perpetual bed-head and baggy lids succeed at making Gary look tired, his character is more pathetic than endearing, regardless of the actor’s many charms. Pegg seems like the only actor fully awake, tearing into every filthy line he’s given. While keeping the dream sequences from being too surreal is an interesting idea, Gary’s subconscious nevertheless resembles a series of perfume advertisements. Paltrow’s dreams lack Lynch’s intensity, Buñuel’s eroticism, or Michel Gondry’s imagination. Best, perhaps, to sleep this one off. GREG ZINMAN FEAST OF LOVE “Houses aren’t haunted, Esther, people are” a local professor, Harry, tells his wife early on in Feast of Love, Robert Benton’s paean to lust and, yes, love in all its infuriating and unexpected forms. The professor, played by Morgan Freeman, is something of a wraith in his close-knit Portland, Oregon suburb. Harry observes couples falling for each other seemingly all over town— in his buddy Bradley’s coffeeshop, at a bustling bar—all while quietly battling grief for his own recent loss. One of those couples, Oscar (Toby Hemingway) and Chloe (Alexa Davalos, in a scene-stealing role), seem to defy the odds of real partnership, slipping into a sumptuous romance despite coping with Oscar’s abusive father. Others, like Bradley (Greg Kinnear) and Kathryn (Selma Blair), are sliding toward bitter alienation; Bradley, who believes that “love is everything,” cannot help but seek out someone who will turn his heart over, even after being rejected by not one but two local women. Benton, who directed Kramer vs. Kramer with such precision and restraint, is in maudlin territory here, allowing shooting stars and torrential downpours to play secondary roles to his sterling cast, which includes the excellent Jane Alexander as Harry’s wife and Radha Mitchell as a femme fatale. The best part, as with many other tearjerkers, is Freeman himself, whose grace and gradual self-forgiveness is the film’s most compelling depiction of what it means to love. SARAH HAIGHT my kid could paint that The essayist Harry Frankfurt once described bullshit as a phenomenon that “most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize and avoid being taken in by.” Oh, how naïve we can be. When Amir Bar-Lev began filming the documentary My Kid Could Paint That he set out to follow the story of an art world darling named Marla, who was five years old and, apparently, an abstract painter extraordinaire. The film begins by trailing an aloof Marla from painting on her kitchen floor to gallery openings in upstate New York where her work sells for as much as $300,000. Halfway through filming, however, 60 Minutes ran an exposé that raised some serious questions about the authenticity of Marla’s paintings after she failed to produce the same style under the observation of their hidden camera. Sales of her work come to a screeching halt, her parents are heckled by their neighbors, and collectors start talking law suits. While Bar-Lev becomes absorbed in uncovering the truth behind these heavy accusations, her parents simultaneously adopt the film as their last chance to clear the family name. Marla won’t comment, her mother tearfully pleads, and the gallery owner who gave her fame continues to try to sell her work, raising the question of exactly how much bullshit the art world can take. MALLORY RICE LARS AND THE REAL GIRL Lars Lindstrom (Ryan Gosling) is a lonely, reclusive type whose concerned family is thrilled when he tells them he met a girl on the Internet. The only problem is that the girl, Bianca, is a life-sized mail-order doll; Lars believes she is real; and he has brought her to live with him. A wise doctor (Patricia Clarkson) advises the family (Emily Mortimer as Lars’s sister-in-law Karin, and Paul Schneider, hilarious as his confounded older brother Gus), and the residents of the small town where they live, to play along with Lars’s delusion in order to cure him of it. They pretend, among many preposterous things, that Bianca is a missionary with a nursing license. The silly, far-fetched premise would seem difficult to pull off, but the witty script, penned by Six Feet Under writer Nancy Oliver, and Gosling’s deadpan charm make this romantic comedy—albeit of a dark, unconventional sort— a kooky delight. AMANDA FORTINI
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