Don't think I didn't notice the "to your face" part stuck in there.
I agree, the bank manager part was the least interesting, made extra-so by her connection to the schizy homeless woman.
Okay, my Complaints (it's really all part of one quibble): Like yeah, sure, that bank manager is going to be letting someone in the filthy homeless schizophrenic's condition come so physically close to her, touch her, breathe on her, touch her money and cigarette packages, showing no distaste, no fear. She's there because it's Just Us Sisters. That connection was phony to me (and the madwoman's acting should get an academy award for Most Awful; the only bad acting in the film), and the fact that it was there sort of illustrates my other criticism about the movie. This is more a personal reaction than a criticism. It's a suspicion, I should say.
Although the detail of each of the characters' lives, and their dialog, and the story about each, was done extremely well, and with art, there was something about the No Social Issue Left Untouched script that made me think of a TV movie or book written in that mode-- a product movie made to order to please a certain very specific demographic. "Product" sums up what disturbed me about the movie. I felt as though it had a target audience in mind (in this case, white liberal females with some college and a mildly feminist bent), and set out to create a product that would let them get as many of that demographic's emotional issues and images as possible into 90 minutes, chose the format with which to do that, hired a GREAT cast and subtle, intelligent writers, and ticked the issues off one by one. They had to have the homeless woman, minimizing the pointlessness of her role by giving her a supernumerary Greek Chorus sort of role (the only preaching in the movie), because they had to get class and poverty and mental illness onto the screen. I guess i'm saying that there is undoubtedly nothing wrong with writing a 90 minute movie containing as themes or at least referencing, class, poverty, mental illness, a soupcon of ethnicity/diversity (didn't need much, the target is white), lesbianism, abortion (shown both as a right and as a personal tragedy), physical 'challenges' of two kinds-- dwarfism and blindness-- death and dying, the care-giving, self-sacrificing duty of women, female sexuality modeled on male sexuality (tough cookie exec), loneliness, suicide, male villainy/insensitivity (the bank manager's boyfriend soon to fulfill the tarot reader's prediction of bad news for Glenn Close; the pregnant exec's boyfriend, and possibly someone in the suicide's life), tolerance of New Age credulity (astrology, tarot) (more than tolerance, a promo.)
Now, I realize that sounds like I didn't like the movie. But in fact I liked it very much! And thought the script, with the exception of the homeless woman's part, was wonderful. (We agree about both the strongest and weakest segments. Glenn Close was amazing. What she did with almost no dialog, only her face.)
But I did have that "product for a demographic" feel, and it made the movie not Top Favorite for me in spite of it's being done awfully skillfully and subtly.
I AM NOT MS. NEGATIVE. |
