Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
5/3/07
Of all the fantasies popularized
by romantic comedies, I think my favorite is that there are strangers out
there in the world, just waiting for you to become mixed up in their lives,
who hold the secret to magically fixing what's wrong with your own.
You, of course, will oblige by then fixing what's screwed up about theirs.
I suppose the best example of this formula is James L. Brooks' endlessly
rewatchable As Good As It Gets. But in practice, this is tough
to pull off, as tricky as answering the question “what really constitutes
fixing someone's life?” Lawrence Kasdan gave it everything he had
in 1991 with Grand Canyon, a movie that, like many of his directorial
efforts, proved far less than the sum of its' great characters and performances
precisely because it couldn't answer that question. A similar problem
bedevils his son Jonathan's feature directing debut, In the Land of
Women. It's a funny, highly watchable movie that left me with
a nagging sense that things hadn't really worked out as well as I was told
they had.
26 year-old, LA-based Carter
Webb (Adam Brody) finds himself at a crossroads. His girlfriend,
popular actress Sofia Bunuel (Elena Anaya), has dumped him. His dream
of writing a great novel about his high school experience has never gotten
beyond page one while he makes a living writing hilariously bad soft core
porn screenplays. He wants to get out and try to regroup. The
perfect chance falls into his lap when he learns that his grandmother Phyllis
(Olympia Dukakis), who lives in Michigan, believes she's terminally ill
(despite all evidence to the contrary) and needs someone to take care of
her. Carter impulsively jumps at the chance and shows up on Phyllis's
doorstep, which is located across the street from the doorstep of the troubled
Hardwicke family. Mother Sarah (Meg Ryan) has just discovered that
she has breast cancer, leaving high school-aged daughter Lucy (Kristen
Stewart), precocious younger daughter Paige (Makenzie Vega) and adulterous
husband Nelson (Clark Gregg) to lend support from an icy distance.
After a chance meeting outside, Sarah starts showing up at Phyllis's place:
she and Carter begin taking long walks where she talks about her life and
her fears (but never the cancer). Wanting to do something nice for
her new friend, she encourages her daughters to take him to the movies,
and friendship also blossoms between Carter and Lucy, another Hardwicke
in desperate need of a confidante. But both relationships soon begin
to creep beyond friendship, resulting in a pair of kisses that can't be
taken back.
Ah yes, those kisses... but
let me rewind and start with what works so well about In the Land of
Women. Like his father, Kasdan shows a gift for creating interesting
people and putting cool words into their mouths. Carter fits the
endlessly likable Brody like a glove, and it's a lot of fun watching the
acerbic Angeleno drift through his slacky new existence as Phyllis's semi-caretaker.
Ryan has also made a career out of being liked, but can shade that with
a fascinating melancholy, as she does here. The desperation with
which she latches onto her new neighbor is kinda sad, and not a lot of
what Sarah does makes sense on the page, but Ryan makes it work for her.
Stewart, such a wonderfully natural young actress going back to Panic
Room, does a great job showing us the conflicted mental process of
a girl whose Mom has basically asked her to have a fling with an older
guy. Kasden does a great job assembling the circumstances to make
it easy to see how Carter would get sucked into her invitation to make
a former flame jealous at a party without realizing where it might lead.
Except that by the time it
does lead there, I was having such a good time with these characters that
I just hated that Kasden needed to take things in such a telanovela direction.
While it's easy enough to see how Carter might find himself impulsively
kissing Sarah, or Lucy kissing Carter, to have both happen in the same
movie becomes kinda silly. And while the story does play at setting
things right between the characters (at least where Sarah's concerned),
it didn't go far enough for me to validate what seemed, for at least a
moment in time, to be pretty positive relationships. The ending is
kinda messy across the board, with Sarah's problems with her husband left
unresolved, and a “happy” ending for Carter that wasn't much more than
just getting back on the horse he didn't seem to know how to ride
when the movie began. But I liked these people, and enjoyed spending
a hundred-odd minutes in their company, which is why on balance I think
the movie works.
Kasden's luck with the main
characters doesn't extend to the smaller roles. Paige isn't “precocious”
(as the movie takes great pains to inform us), she's an adult in a kid's
body, which is just bad writing. Having been one myself, I can tell
you what a ten-year old who thinks they talk just like a grown-up sounds
like (basically, a ten year old with a thesaurus), and it's nothing like
her. In fact, you could have re-written a couple other characters'
conversations about her, recast Paige as Sarah's mother rather than her
daughter, and not had to change many of her lines. Phyllis is fun
to have around, particularly because of Dukakis's always-sharp comic timing,
and Kasden hands her some great one-liners. But I kept expecting
some sort of look inside her wacky head, and it never comes. Similarly,
all of Lucy's classmates, including Guy She's Meant To Be With Eric (Dustin
Milligan), are stick figures: since Carter's expecting them to inspire
his Great American Novel, it's surprising that none of them does anything
remotely interesting. There's a germ of interest in how lousy and
manipulative what little we see of Sofia is compared to the way Carter
describes her, but in the end it's really hard to buy a guy living such
an unfulfilled life as his dating a woman famous enough to have her own
Gap ad and a movie everyone's seen.
But I keep coming back to
those moments of connection... Carter and Sarah's walks, he and Lucy talking
on an empty football field, the letter he leaves behind. In the
Land of Women has the soul of a great movie: it's genuinely funny,
and its' lead characters really pop. But the story doesn't seal the
deal. It's very watchable, but if I saw it again, the missed opportunities
would probably drive me crazy. In the end, I'm left to worry about
these screwed-up people who've been given such a mildly happy ending to
work with by their writer... I hope they'll be OK without me to keep an
eye on them... |
