Hey folks, Harry here with another report from Harold Hellman, who has done a terrific job thus far. I'll be checking out TADPOLE this coming week at CineVegas and hope that it is as good as I've heard from Sundance and my sources at Miramax and other places. So without further batting about the bush, let's push forward shall we?
THE SAFETY OF OBJECTS - written and directed by Rose Troche
"The Safety of Objects," adapted by writer-director Rose Troche from a book of short stories by A.M. Homes, is a bold, daring, and enormously ambitious work that nevertheless falls just short of greatness. Troche does a good job taking several disconnected stories and weaving them into a single multithreaded narrative, and her visual sense has progressed remarkably over the years, but "Safety of Objects" goes off in a few too many directions to fully hang together as a coherent work.
The title is the key to the film: It's intended to serve as a critique of materialism, and as an expression of the idea that possessions, when given too much importance in our lives, can get in the way of happiness. Of course, in reality, it isn't quite that simple, and Troche wrestles with this complexity in a variety of interesting ways. This theme is most fascinating when the story goes beyond material objects and looks at what happens when we treat other people as things to be owned, possessed and controlled; many of these moments are quite provocative and moving indeed, and raise the film to another level.
In general, we follow four families, learning about their past triumphs and tragedies and watching them navigate their current emotional obstacles. The Golds, led by matriarch Esther (Glenn Close), seem to be happy, but it's a brittle shell over the ongoing heartache of the comatose son lying upstairs. The Trains also seem happy, but the father Jim (Dermot Mulroney) spends long hours at the office away from his wife (Moira Kelly) and children, and is gradually losing any sense of purpose in his life. Their neighbor Annette (Patricia Clarkson) is a single mother who knows she's better off without her obnoxious ex-husband but still struggles to raise her two daughters. And the Christiansons are primarily represented by mother Helen (Mary Kay Place), who's apparently going slowly insane with suburban boredom. The wild card is Randy (Timothy Olyphant), a handyman type who seems to be observing the local children with a little too much interest.
The film observes the many ways the characters relate to their possessions. Jake Train (Alex House), for example, is apparently so addled by the onset of puberty that he engages in elaborate fantasy games with his younger sister's Barbie doll. Esther Gold has signed up for a competition at the mall, with the victor taking home a new car (an endurance contest evidently inspired by the documentary "Hands on a Hard Body"); her determination to win is clearly more about mending her relationship with her daughter than a desire for the vehicle. Even simple gestures with personal items take on greater significance; note the attention given to the removal of a wedding ring towards the end of the film.
Troche deftly orchestrates the various events, showing a good sense of when to leave a thread alone and move to another one, or when it's appropriate to flash back briefly to add to the backstory of how the Gold son (Joshua Jackson) wound up in his coma. The cast is uniformly excellent: Close is wonderful, as usual; Place is wonderfully loopy; and I've never seen better work from Mulroney. Robert Klein seems wasted in a tiny role as Howard Gold, but it's more than balanced by amazing performances by the children, especially House, mentioned above, and Kristen Stewart (who played Jodie Foster's daughter in "Panic Room") as one of Annette's children and the unfortunate object of Randy's attention.
The problem, though, is that these story threads vary wildly in tone, from the skin-crawling dread of a child abduction to the absurdist comedy of Jake's love for his sister's doll, and from the agonized heartbreak of Esther's losing her son to the gentle satire of Jim's unexpected discovery of a mission in life. Taken individually, the stories all work marvelously, and there are some stylistic choices that seem designed to tie the film together (e.g., the occasional use of voice-over narration that seems otherwise out of place), but nevertheless the various elements don't really feel like they entirely belong in the same movie. It's hard to say if Troche is just unaware of this problem, or if she does recognize it and goes for broke anyway, throwing everything up and hoping it sticks.
Troche arrived with a splash in 1994 with "Go Fish," a passable movie that seemed much better than it was at the time because until then there had been nothing else like it. "The Safety of Objects" is an order of magnitude more complex, with a significantly more sophisticated theme and structure, and Troche comes within a whisker of pulling off a remarkable and audacious synthesis. Even if she doesn't quite make it, you still have to give serious respect to the attempt.
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TADPOLE - written by Niels Mueller and Heather
McGowan; directed by Gary Winick
Fast, clever, and funny, if ultimately inconsequential, "Tadpole" is a breath of fresh air amid the overlong and self-important movies at this year's festival. It's perhaps too small and idiosyncratic to really connect with a wide audience, but people looking for a smart character-based comedy that doesn't particularly challenge them will adore it.
The premise is a twist on "The Graduate," which the movie glibly acknowledges in a bit of throwaway dialogue. Oscar, aka Tadpole (Aaron Stanford), is a forlorn fifteen-year-old; he's desperately in love with his stepmother Eve (Sigourney Weaver). Naturally he conceals this from his father (John Ritter), a good-natured but easily distracted academic, while he plots with his friend Charlie (Robert Iler) about how best to confess his love to Eve. Things get complicated, however, when he discovers that while he's unsure of Eve's feelings, her best friend Diane (Bebe Neuwirth) may actually be more receptive to his advances.
It seems like a formulaic sitcom plot, and in many ways it is, albeit with an Oedipal twist -- but the story doesn't develop quite the way you'd expect, choosing to play some cards surprisingly early and not playing other expected cards at all. The story proceeds at a brisk pace; at barely an hour and twenty minutes, counting credits, nothing is labored or padded, and the movie ends exactly when and where it should. The humor doesn't rely on broad slapstick or easy vulgarity, either; the dialogue is sharp and witty and delivered at an almost screwball clip, demanding that you listen to every line to catch the gags.
There are only a couple of negatives, but they're woven throughout the film and will no doubt annoy certain viewers to distraction. First, while the humor is subtle and literate in a style that is almost never seen these days -- imagine a modern Moss Hart, for example -- the movie is almost *too* clever. Oscar is far brighter than his peers, casually sprinkling his conversation with allusions from classical writers and historians, and the story is structured around a series of title cards featuring quotations from Voltaire. And yet, despite this intellectual veneer, there just isn't very much going on besides the (admittedly pretty funny) comedy. The feeling is like "Rushmore" lite, with all of the heady stuff not much more than window dressing to a few good laughs.
The other problem is the murky shot-on-video look of the film. This was obviously a financial consideration, but the picture is gloomy, muddled, and definitely at odds with the Howard-Hawks-esque setting and comedic style. In the film's best scenes -- for example, a family dinner at a fancy restaurant, which Oscar desperately works to prevent from turning into an evening of humiliating revelations -- the low budget fades behind the snappy banter. But at other times, the formula shows through and the comedy feels strained, contrasting awkwardly with what, based on the look and feel, seems like a serious independent drama.
But at my screening, the audience laughed a lot, and applauded enthusiastically at the end. The performances are consistently good, from Ritter's quiet befuddlement to Neuwirth's twinkling impishness, from Weaver's uncertain dignity to Stanford's pining ache. Even if the movie is an awfully slight piece of work, and won't stay with you for more than a few hours afterward, it's pretty much worth the time you spend with it.
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