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Friday, June 8, 2012
MOVIE REVIEW
Peace, Love & Misunderstanding
Upstate, And Swimming Downstream In The New 1960s
Three generations: Elizabeth Olsen, Jane Fonda and Catherine Keener in Bruce
Beresford's comedy "Peace, Love & Misunderstanding".
IFC
Films
by
Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com
FOLLOW
Friday, June 8, 2012
"Peace, Love & Misunderstanding",
a sunny, bright and colorful comedy directed by Bruce Beresford ("Driving Miss
Daisy") is also rather ordinary, predictable and static despite occasional
bursts of hilarity. Had it not been for Jane Fonda's addictive and
addicting resplendent earth mama from Woodstock circa 1969, "Peace, Love" would
instead have been "Please, Leave" the theater. The film opened today in
select U.S. cities.
As it is, "Peace, Love & Misunderstanding" explores how a family internalizes or
externalizes the effect of its fractures. In a dour, darkened opening
scene around a dinner table at a New York City restaurant among a group of
friends sit Diane (Catherine Keener) and Mark (Kyle MacLachlan). We
already know that Mark (whose occupation isn't necessarily clear) has asked
Diane, his conservative corporate attorney wife, for a divorce for unknown
reasons. At the dinner they couldn't be more isolated from each other.
Their teenage children Zoe (Elizabeth Olsen) and Jake (Nat Wolff) have a summer
to sit with the painful information they will later learn, and a wordless drive
upstate to Woodstock puts them in touch with Diane's estranged mother Grace (Ms.
Fonda).
Hippie Grace (think Grace Slick of rock band Jefferson Airplane?) organizes
peace rallies and is the vibrant life of Woodstock. Well known and
admired, Grace regales anyone who will listen with her stories of Woodstock '69
and philosophies about peace, justice, love and drugs -- Grace has plenty of
each of these to give. Her two grandchildren instantly adapt and set off
on coming-of-age adventures. One is a believer in the sanctity of animal
life, the other a budding filmmaker. The characters they meet are just
waiting to be hugged, loved and kissed, and the film is replete with stock
characters you're familiar with. At best "Peace, Love & Misunderstanding"
is an entertaining, modest work that showcases the gregarious Grace in an
all-world turn by Ms. Fonda; at worst it's a pleasant film amused by its own
charm, delight and fun.
Mr. Beresford's film marks the big screen debut of
Elizabeth
Olsen. ("Martha
Marcy May Marlene", filmed after "Peace, Love", was released last
year.) Ms. Olsen shows genuine curiosity and intelligence in the
characters she inhabits and you see her radiate the results on screen. Her
eyes are always inquiring, her expressions and physical language searching for
something deeper. An example of this is in a scene where Zoe is in a
pick-up truck. An incident occurs. You observe the silence Ms. Olsen
allows and what she does with it to convey her sentiments. It's adroitly
rendered, occupying beats that stretch the scene in question making it more
meaningful than some seasoned actors might. While her role as Zoe is
largely functional there's a confidence and attitude about her acting here and
in "Martha Marcy" and this year's
"Silent House" that is arresting. (Ms.
Olsen will also be seen in "Liberal Arts" and "Red Lights" this year and Spike
Lee's remake "Oldboy" in 2013.)
Additionally, in a nice touch, is an actress you will recognize in a small,
perhaps insignificant role. I thoroughly enjoyed her few minutes of time
in "Peace, Love & Misunderstanding" and was pleased she elected to be
nondescript. Few actors these days choose to go that route perhaps for
money, the sake of vanity, ego and other motivations of narcissism but the
casual, unaffected way her character adds a line or a smile or other expression
that enhances a shot or a scene, makes Mr. Beresford's film a nicer place in
which to spend some escapist time. Granted, some shots or scenes aren't
needed, including the opening one -- yet that staid, imperial-looking New York
City skyline in silhouette establishes the sense of soullessness and impersonal
attitude Diane embodies.
The always reliably great and perceptive Ms. Keener, who plays the role of
anguished mother, wife and child well here, brings the same earthy foundation to
her work that Ms. Fonda does, except to serve Diane's provincial strictures.
For all her assuredness and sense of order Diane still looks for her true
compass in life. She fights against dropping her sword and grabbing a
plowshare but there's something in the Woodstock air she hasn't dared to breathe
in 20 years that penetrates her senses so irresistibly. (In
"Please
Give" (2010) Ms. Keener enjoyed a similar role of New York City
mother -in-crisis after familial difficulty. Here, Diane needn't suspect
misbehavior. She knows the score from the start.) Diane, like the
film itself, navigates through tangled mother-daughter relationships without
somehow going completely off-the-rails crazy. At times Diane has to mother
Grace, in good acting moments by Ms. Keener and Ms. Fonda.
Despite Ms. Fonda's highly enjoyable physical performance, one of her best in
many years, the seductive, charismatic Grace is cardboard material, an inelastic
type who doesn't get to go very far depth-wise as a character; rather her ideas
travel and are planted into her grandkids. (By contrast: I think back to
"Georgia Rule" of a few years ago and cringe at how harsh, self-serious and
grating it and the characters were, including the righteous one Ms. Fonda
played.) Grace is rigid in one sense -- rigidly committed to love and
peace. In directing her Mr. Beresford clearly trades on Ms. Fonda's heyday
activist years as much as the actress herself does. Ms. Fonda revels
spectacularly in nostalgia, though in a far less abrasive and polarizing way
than in the then-immediate events she participated in in the late 1960s and
early 1970s. Her charm and wit prevents Grace from overstaying her
welcome, but only barely.
With all the good feeling engendered by "Peace, Love & Misunderstanding" any
melodrama surrounding the love fest sprinkling the audience's heart throughout
is an afterthought, impacting little on the overall message and inescapably
gentle spirit of the film. After all, what's a little arguing up against
the big L word? ( The bickering doesn't stand a chance, anyway.) A coda of
sorts effectively if redundantly sums up all that has transpired in film's
previous hour-plus, and better than the film itself.
Written by Joseph Muszynski and Christina Mengert, "Peace, Love &
Understanding", full of aphorisms, is one all its own, a film that stands firmly
on the ground of its missive: to get audiences to indulge their own sense of
realization in the idea that frolicking merrily in the imperfections of family
and grasping the positive things that emerge from its flaws is a gratifying,
even liberating experience. The rigid Diane ("it's not Diana") learns this
foremost, and you know what will happen when Jude (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a
neighborhood musician is introduced to her.
With: Chace Crawford,
Katharine McPhee, Poorna Jagannathan, Maddie Corman.
"Peace, Love & Misunderstanding" is rated
R by
the Motion Picture Association Of America for drug references and sexual content. The film's
running time is one hour and 36 minutes.
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