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Filmmakers often underestimate how important it can be to feel their love for their characters. When a writer/director sees the people on-screen as three-dimensional people with hopes, dreams, and fears instead of just cogs in the machine of their plot, it’s much easier for us to do the same. For example, Richard Linklater loves Jesse and Celine, the leads in his “Before” trilogy. He roots for them. He wants to hang out with them as much as we do. And that kind of love for an unexpected pairing comes through in Jay Duplass’ wonderful “The Baltimorons,” a tender walk-and-talk that unfolds over the course of one unpredictable holiday evening. It’s a character study built around one of the core tenets of improvisational comedy: “Yes, And.” The idea is that you don’t stop the flow of comedy that’s being written on a stage, but it can also translate to not stopping yourself from living. We could all “Yes, And” more of life.
The story of “The Baltimorons” emerged from the true story of its lead, the spectacularly charming Michael Strassner, who revealed in Q&As that the incident that opens the film, in which he attempts suicide after an improv show gone wrong, was pulled from his own life. Cut to six months later and Strassner’s Cliff seems to have gotten everything in order. He’s been sober since the attempt, and he no longer does comedy, which makes his fiancé happy. She worries a lot about the pressure of the comedy scene and the free-flowing alcohol, encouraging him not to do the show on Christmas Eve that his buddies want him to do. Instead, they’ll hang out with her family, eat sweet potatoes, and maybe watch a game or two.
Cliff’s holiday plans go awry when he trips on his way into the home of his in-laws-to-be and cracks a tooth. He gets a hold of the only dentist willing to come into the office on Christmas Eve, a divorcee named Didi (the fantastic Liz Larsen), who just found out that her ex has married his much-younger girlfriend. Didi is at a stage of life where she feels unseen by the world, and that sense of loneliness is about to be exacerbated by spending the holiday alone. Cliff overhears a conversation about Didi’s situation, and his giant heart seeks to make Didi’s holiday a little better, leading to a series of entirely unpredictable events, almost like an improv show that could go in any direction.
Duplass and Strassner have crafted a beautiful film that somehow feels spontaneous, a window into a relationship that wouldn’t have happened without a missed step. I’m big on what Paul Auster called “The Music of Chance,” a sense that life would be totally different if not for one random event, and “The Baltimorons” hums with that energy. But it’s not just twists of fate that make Cliff and Didi so memorable: It’s their bone-deep decency. These are good people trying to make it through a tough world, and they see each other in a way that no one else has in years. It’s an incredibly funny, genuinely moving character study that’s not explicitly “about” anything but these two lovely people, and yet I walked away from it telling myself to “Yes, And” more of my own life. It’s so much easier to “No, But.” It’s worth the effort not only to really see other people in our lives but to understand that we control how we improvise through this existence. Say yes more.
As much as “The Baltimorons” unfolds with organic hilarity, Amy Landecker’s directorial debut, “For Worse,” struggles to avoid sitcom trappings. When Landecker trusts herself completely as a writer, director, and performer, her comedy works. There are unforced conversations in this film, especially one near the end on a bench outside an Urgent Care, that I legitimately adored, scenes in which Landecker’s underrated acting ability imbues this character with truth. But it’s almost like Landecker doesn’t think viewers will follow this arc without the goofy, exaggerated stuff that plays like a CBS sitcom. That’s the “for worse” parts of this film, although there may be just enough “for better” ones to draw an audience when it’s released.
The “Transparent” star plays Lauren, a newly divorced and new sober mom in L.A. who joins a class for commercial acting—as in, how to really sell the latest pharmaceutical in a way that gets your ad to run for years. In that class, run by an intense Gaby Hoffmann, Lauren is surrounded by twentysomethings, but what I like the most about “For Worse” is how much it doesn’t fully rely on clichés when it comes to whether or not Lauren can fit in with people much younger than her. She may have different priorities than these young people, but she’s not done having fun either and would like to have something more than just fun with her hunky scene partner Sean (Nico Haraga). When one of her classmates (Kiersey Clemons) invites everyone to her wedding in the desert, Lauren and Sean go together, and that’s where “For Worse” starts to succumb to sitcom set-ups like jealousy of the hot bridesmaid and a truly horrendous character who tries to flirt with her played by Ken Marino. Luckily, Landecker gives her husband Bradley Whitford a great role to balance the nonsense.
There’s a constant push-and-pull between forced humor and organic laughter in “For Worse.” Landecker is likable enough to make this a hard movie to hate, but I kept hoping the movie would truly let her loose instead of pushing her from one uncomfortable encounter to another. The truth is that we accept a certain amount of sitcom set-ups in wedding rom-coms—Landecker name-drops a classic in “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” and that film isn’t exactly free of silliness—so I wouldn’t blame anyone for going with the flow on this one. I just wished that flow was a bit more consistent.
There’s a similar YMMV aspect to Katie Aselton’s heartfelt “Magic Hour,” a movie that feels like it’s from a personal place but also one that ran out of ideas for me before it ran out of runtime. Aselton is trying to say something new about grief and recovery, but she says most of it early in this relatively short film, and I longed for something a bit deeper by its end. Still, anyone who has dealt with the kind of unimaginable pain that shifts reality could resonate with this story of a woman who knows she’s no longer stable and isn’t sure if she wants to be ever again.
Aselton’s Katie has traveled to a gorgeous house in the desert near Joshua Tree with her husband Charlie (Daveed Diggs). From the beginning, the conversations between Katie and Charlie seem unusually weighted. There are discussions of something horrible in their recent past, but Aselton’s film doesn’t reveal it for about 20 minutes, so I’ll do my best to talk around the specific event that brought Katie and Charlie to this place to heal. Suffice to say, these two are no longer the same, and they’ve come to the desert to figure out how to move on, or if they even can.
Once the mystery of “Magic Hour” drifts away, the unusual dialogue and blocking of the early scenes make more sense, but here’s where wheels start to spin. I was with “Magic Hour” through its mysterious set-up and most of the emotional exchanges that followed, but Aselton runs out of places to go thereafter.
She admittedly uses her setting well as cinematographer Sarah Whelden embraces the film meaning of the title too, shooting the desert like the surreal, magical place it can be. This is clearly a personal project for the underrated Aselton—she co-wrote it with partner Mark Duplass—and I’m happy to see her return to her indie roots after the misstep of “Mack & Rita.” If it’s a story about a woman finding out what’s next for her, the best thing that could come out of it would be that its creator could do the same.
from Roger Ebert https://ift.tt/GJULBcO
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