Three stars. Rating: R, for profanity, sexual content and drug use
By Derrick Bang
Writer/director Michael J. Weithorn's little film loses its way in the very first scene.
We meet our heroine, dental hygienist Laura Pehlke (Jenna Fischer), in a patient's-eye view as she bends toward the camera with a probe in hand, preparing to scrape the plaque from the teeth of some poor fellow reclining in the chair. The office pet, a gorgeous parrot with a vocabulary of two words — "Rinse, please," repeated over and over — gets on her last ragged nerve. The bird is intended to be soothing for patients; Laura finds it anything but (and who can blame her?).
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| Remembering the fun they often had while singing along with the radio, Laura (Jenna Fischer) tries to cheer up her son Dennis (Daniel Yelsky) with the same tactic. But Dennis, having just entered his teenage years, can't be bothered ... or so he'd like everybody to believe. |
The scene is played for giggles: not knee-slapping gales of laughter, but chuckles at the very least.
We take our cues, going into a film, from the way early scenes are composed: atmosphere, lighting, camera angles, dialogue, the physical bearing of anybody in frame. Weithorn thus prepares us for something light and gentle: perhaps a larkish romantic comedy, perhaps a ruefully perceptive sketch of a thirtysomething woman at loose ends.
Instead, a few scenes later, we're doused with poisonous relationship dynamics that qualify as indefensible cruelty: not just to Laura, but to us viewers. Suddenly, we're in Weithorn's riff on the raw, bitter, family-verité vitriol of Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married. The abrupt change of tone is akin to whiplash.
Laura suffers abuse from every quarter: the marriage from hell, the sister and parents from hell. She apparently endures this mistreatment because somewhere, long ago, she resigned herself to it. We've no idea why, nor will we ever find out. Weithorn fails to supply the roughly 45 minutes of back-story that would justify any of this.
Husband Bob (Chris O'Donnell), habitually coming home late from work, obviously is having an affair. Laura plays doormat as she tries to ignore the screamingly blatant signs; Bob parries direct questions with complaints that he'd feel more like making love to her, if she "hadn't let herself go."
Jenna Fischer? Let herself go? Good Lord, she couldn't be any cuter. Hearing Bob claim otherwise makes him sound like an idiot. More disconnect.
Granted, it has become Hollywood custom for gorgeous young actresses to wind up in stories that find them a) unloved; b) unable to find boyfriends or girlfriends; c) deemed "plain"; and/or d) generally cast aside as ugly ducklings who've not yet blossomed. Depending on the film, we either smile in tolerant amusement or roll our eyes with irritation. This one goes way beyond irritation, since Laura's "appearance" is at the core of Weithorn's script.
