The Manchurian Candidate is Still Powerful

 

 

 

 

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

Produced and directed by John Frankenheimer

United Artists, 126 minutes, PG-13

In black and white

★★★★★

 

Most psychiatrists either do not believe in brainwashing or have declared it unproven. Yet, when heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped (1974) and subsequently helped her captors rob banks, her counsel insisted she was a victim of Stockholm syndrome, in which an abused person comes to identify with her captors/abusers. You can make up your own mind about such things, but when The Manchurian Candidate came out (1962) mind control was indeed considered a real thing. The Cold War between the United States and the communist bloc was at a fever pitch. (The Berlin Wall was less than a year old.)

 

The Manchurian Candidate is a classic Cold War film from when President John F. Kennedy was in office, though George Axelrod’s script was based upon a 1959 novel from Richard Condon. Note that I said “novel.” Yet to audiences of its day it felt like a documentary, a belief enhanced by the use of melodramatic narration from Paul Frees. The movie’s depiction of North Korean, Chinese, and Soviet uses of brainwashing was taken so seriously that the CIA launched what is now a discredited program: MKUltra, the use of psychedelics (including LSD) to interrogate enemy captives.

 

The Manchurian Candidate is considered a film of such importance that it is preserved in the Library of Congress. If that doesn’t sway you, know that it’s considered an American classic and is indeed a very fine film. Stay with it, as the opening is bold and odd. A bunch of American GIs sit intently listening to a lecture on gardening. Huh? We only catch on when the women’s faces dissolve into those of Korean, Chinese, and Russian military personnel. We are actually witnessing a show trial of a different sort. An American platoon captured during the Korean War was brainwashed in China. As a demonstration of how effective it has been, Sgt. Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) is shown a Queen of Diamonds and ordered to kill two of his men as victims and their peers sit passively.

 

As the film moves back to the United States, Shaw is hailed as a hero. Shaw is vaguely unsettled, but more by the fact that thinks his mother Eleanor (Angela Lansbury) and her fungible second husband, Senator John Iselin (James Gregory) are creeps. (The novel involved mother/son forced incest, a big no-no for a 1962 movie.) Also troubled is recently promoted Major Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra) who has reoccurring dreams that Shaw was a hated squad leader who killed two of his own men. Another soldier has the same dreams and Marco is assigned to intelligence to investigate.

 

Shaw’s handlers prove to his American contacts that he is a controllable sleeper agent assassin by ordering Shaw to murder a newspaper editor critical of Senator Iselin, a rabid right-winger browbeaten by his wife Eleanor. She advises him, for instance, to claim that the Defense Department is riddled with communists. If that rings a bell, Iselin is clearly based upon infamous Senator Joseph McCarthy’s during the early 1950s. In the film, Shaw keeps tabs on Iselin’s liberal foe, Senator Thomas Jordan (John McGiver) and ingratiates himself to Jordan’s daughter Jocelyn (Leslie Parrish). While we’re at it, let’s assign a love interest for Major Marco, “Rosie” Cheyney (Janet Leigh). They first meet on a train and låater bails Marco out of jail for assaulting a Korean (Henry Silva!) he recognizes as an agent.

 

The Manchurian Candidate is terrifically acted, which more than compensates for situations we today might find overdone or implausible. Perhaps some of the names of the actors are unfamiliar to younger readers. In 1962, though, this was an all-star cast. Harvey was perhaps better known in Britain than in North America, but he was well cast for his icy, withdrawn demeanor. Lansbury was a veteran of stage, screen, and television–think Tony awards, Oscar nominations, Golden Globes, and Emmys–and Leigh had a distinguished movie career. She was the gal in the shower in Psycho and the mother of Jamie Lee Curtis. Could Sinatra act? He sure could. Even his mistakes were praised. (Watch for an out-of-focus scene in Manchurian Candidate used to show disorientation.)

 

Will Marco be able to stop Shaw? The Manchurian Candidate is a beat-the-clock thriller with sneaky motives, oily villains, and a shocking ending. Beware the Queen of Diamonds!

 

Rob Weir

 

 

The Good Boss is a Superb Comedy

 

 

 

 

The Good Boss/El bueno patrón (2021/22)

Written and Directed by Fernando Léon de Anora

Tripictures ,120 minutes, Not rated (sexual situations, drugs, language)

In Spanish with subtitles

★★★★★

 

Unless you live near an art cinema, chances are good you’ve not seen The Good Boss. You should; it shows how a comedy can be funny without being inane. Director Fernando Léon de Anora gets an excellent performance from Javier Bardem (No Country for Old Men, Biutiful). This movie was nominated for over 40 awards in Spain and Europe and won 34 times!

 

Julio Blanco (Bardem) owns an industrial scale factory and fancies himself a caring boss. Every morning he smiles as he enters the factory, greets employees by name and encourages his workers to come to him with any problem. He also prone to giving motivational talks, the most recent of which was delivered from atop a cherry picker. He informs everyone that the company is a finalist for an award of excellence that would reflect well on all of them. Is Blanco a boss with a heart of gold? Where’s the fun in that? Lots of things go wrong in advance of the visiting team’s arrival. It starts with the need to scale back costs and the firing of José (Oscar de la Fuente), an accountant.

 

José begs Blanco to reconsider and claims he will lose his children. When he is nonetheless let go, José isn’t the kind of guy to go quietly. Instead, he becomes a one-man protest group with a bullhorn and a ramshackle camp outside the factory gate. Because it’s on public land, there’s little Blanco or his Falstaffian guard Román (Fernando Abizul) can do about it. Each day José finds new ways to annoy Blanco.

 

Nonetheless, Blanco believes his good reputation gives him influence. When long-time employee Fortunata (Celso Bugallo) asks Blanco to talk to his son Salva, Blanco does so and secures him a job as a courier for this wife’s shop. Alas, Salva (Martin Páez) is a racist skinhead punk who plays Blanco like a cheap accordion, so don’t expect this to go well. To make matters worse, his floor manager Miralles (Manolo Solo) whom he has known since childhood is depressed and screwing up orders. Miralles tells Blanco  that his wife has left him. Blanco to the rescue? How would you feel if someone tried to intervene in your personal affairs? Even if you’ve never taken a psychology class you might suspect that Blanco is reality-challenged. Even though he has a daughter and is married to the striking Adela (Sonia Almarcha), Blanco has a roving eye for a new intern, Lilianna (Almundena Amor).

 

In an attempt to cheer up Miralles, Blanco takes him to a bar staffed by ladies of easy virtue. Something happens there that seriously complicates matters, as does a dinner with a couple he and Adela have known for many years that is beyond awkward. Blanco finds himself in a power play he cannot win. Will Blanco be able to add the award for excellence to his wall of citations and trophies? Let’s just say that changes are made.

 

The Good Boss is like a more subtle version of  9 to 5 and with the tasteful score of Zetia Montes rather than the downhome country of Dolly Parton in 9 to 5. * The Good Boss, though, is funnier. Bardem doesn’t do physical comedy like Buster Keaton, but he does borrow a page of bathos from Keaton’s book. He practically oozes befuddlement when forced to confront the gaps between how he’d like to be perceived and how others see him. For the most part, he is a good boss, but he constantly flunks the Boundaries 101 test.

 

The Good Boss is well-acted all around, even when the parts are small. Because everyone is so effective, we see things Blanco does not. We can tell, for instance, that Fortuna is willing to do things to keep his job, but he doesn’t want to be Blanco’s buddy. There is also a matter of key employees leveraging the fact that corporate culture operates on power arrangements, not smiles and smarm.

 

But let’s not overanalyze. The Good Boss is indeed a comedy that plays things for laughs, not a sociology class. Check it out on Fandango or Paramount + and see how understatement is a hoot of a different  volume.

 

Rob Weir

The Beatles: Get Back Details the End of an Era

 

 

 

The Beatles: Get Back (2021)

Directed by Peter Jackson

WingNut Films/Apple/Disney + 468 minutes (3 episodes of DVDs)

PG-13 (tons of smoking and language)

★★★★

 

It took a while to get my hands on The Beatles: Get Back  whose streaming rights are owned by Disney +. I watched it on DVD on consecutive nights, which is how Disney aired it. I finished on January 30, the 56^th anniversary of The Beatles’ unauthorized 1969 rooftop concert at Apple Corps, the final public appearance of the band.

 

Director Peter Jackson took on a massive project that consumed four years. Even with extensive editing this “documentary” checks in at nearly 8 hours of viewing time. I placed documentary in quotes, though, as there is very little narrative structure, external commentary, or attempt to evaluate what you see. Jackson uses raw footage of a month of The Beatles biting off more than they could chew. 

 

Each member of the band knew they had reached a creative crossroads and that The Beatles had run its course. The film follows the Fab Four’s intention of going out with a bang: a TV show, a film, and a live performance– all in a month. (Ringo Starr had to be on the set for filming of the satirical comedy The Magic Christian.) It didn’t help matters that they intended to record up to 30 songs that didn’t rehash any of their earlier releases, yet had little idea of what they would be. In retrospect the Let It Be album was a miracle.

 

Episode One covers days one through seven. The Beatles assembled in Twickenham Studios, which was supposed to be where the TV show would be recorded and maybe the site of an indoor concert. The band had writers block and disliked barn-like Twickenham. They wasted time goofing off and the new material could only charitably be called rudimentary. The first episode is the only one to rely on archival materials to supplement personal remembrances. Linda Eastman–Paul’s wife two months later–snapped a lot of photos and Yoko Ono was practically glued to John Lennon. There was tension in the studio, but not between John and Paul; George Harrison felt ignored and abruptly quit the band.  

 

Episode Two looks at the hiatus before George rejoined The Beatles, and days 8-16 in the studio. Twickenham was abandoned for the intimate confines of Apple Corps. This served to lift spirits and get creative juices running. The concert was put on hold, though ultimately, the TV plan was the one to go. The Beatles had time to noodle around with everything from their back catalogue to early rock n’ roll, Dylan tunes, old time country, and show music, as the studio wasn’t yet fully equipped. But you can see the joy coming back, especially after Billy Preston joined in to play electric keyboards and light the room with his infectious enthusiasm. The only visible discomfort came from a weird visit from Peter Sellers and from worried producer George Martin. The songs were still rough, but The Beatles even reconsidered doing a concert.

 

Episode Three covers days 17-22; that is, from shaping a handful of songs and  performing a 42–minute rooftop concert that startled and thrilled most people along Savile Row. Spoilsport complaints of crowd ed streets and noise sent police officers to Apple to tell them to stop the concert. This footage is like a cross between Monty Python and Keystone Kops. Then it was back to the studio to finish the album. (How are you going to get a baby grand piano onto a rooftop?)

 

Assessment:  

 

·      Get Back is overly long but its tedious moments reveal how long it takes to make magic out of scraps.

·      There is very little truth to tales of Paul and John feuding, and even less to Paul’s pique over Yoko’s presence. He, in fact, defended Yoko when questions arose whether she was disruptive.

·      It was Paul who insisted that The Beatles should not recycle and it was he who was the most creative. He grew annoyed with the lack of focus in the studio but he also had a heart-to-heart with John and insisted that John was the real leader of the band.

·      Paul played the piano beautifully and was okay as a drummer. Each band member played multiple instruments and Ringo was okay on guitar!

·      Ringo was preoccupied and George clearly wanted out, but what a wonderful moment to see Paul and John grinning through their performances.

·      Peter Jackson was off his game in Get Back. Former students might recall me insisting one of your papers needed sharper focus and better editing. Jackson might have flunked my class!

 

Rob Weir

The Room Next Door a Bomb

 

 

 

The Room Next Door (2024)

Directed by Pedro Almodóvar

Warner Brothers Pictures, 106 minutes, PG-13 (language, sexual references)

In English

★★

 

I routinely swear off Pedro Almodóvar films but new ones come out that trumpet that his latest effort is “different.” My bad for getting suckered in. The only thing that’s different about The Room Next Door is that it’s in English, not Spanish. The usual slobbering has reoccurred: The Room Next Door was nominated of 10 Goya awards (Spain’s version of the Oscars),  Almodóvar somehow won a Golden Lion trophy in Venice, and praise came from reviewers who still think he’s an auteur.

 

Nonsense! Almodóvar is the Spanish Woody Allen; both have said everything new they had to say decades ago. Almodóvar shares Allen’s inability to place credible dialogue in the mouth of his actors. Neither has an ear for how people really talk; it’s as if everyone is sitting in a 1970s’ coffee shop amidst pseudo-intellectuals.

 

Other than a very good performance from Julianne Moore, there’s nothing much to recommend The Room Next Door. Successful author Ingrid (Moore) is signing books for a massive line of fawning fans for her work in which she confesses her deep fear of aging and death. (The movie is based on a Sigrid Nunez novel written during the pandemic.) At the signing, a friend tells Ingrid that Martha (Tilda Swinton) has terminal cancer. Ingrid hasn’t seen Martha for years, but they were close friends when they worked on a magazine before Ingrid became a full-time writer and Martha a war correspondent. Ingrid visits the gaunt Martha at the hospital and the two rekindle their friendship, despite Martha’s insistence that she’s resigned to dying.

 

As the two reminiscence, the film goes into flashback sequences, especially those involving Martha’s journalistic jaunts, including one involving a photographer (Juan Diego Botto) leaving a warzone knowing his lover, a Spanish priest, is unlikely to survive the rebel onslaught. They also discuss what a great sexual partner Damian (John Turturro) was, with Ingrid dodging Martha’s musing over where he might be, as Ingrid is currently in a relationship with him. An even bigger issue is that Martha has long been estranged from her daughter Michelle who is angry that Martha never told her who her father is.

 

As Martha gets sicker, her only desire is to not die alone. She has secured a highly illegal euthanasia pill on the dark web and intends to take it soon. After three friends decline Martha’s request to be with her, she asks Ingrid. It is emphatically something she doesn’t want to do as she’s opposed to suicide and we know how she feels about death. The movie’s title references the deal the two make. Martha rents an amazing house in upstate New York and Ingrid agrees to stay with her, but not in the same room. Ingrid’s room is one floor down from Martha’s and if Ingrid arises and sees Martha’s bedroom door closed, the deed has been done.

 

If you think about it, it’s maudlin and sad to be sure, but it’s pretty thin for a script. To stretch things out, there’s an appended postscript involving the police and an attempt on Ingrid’s part to assuage Michelle (also Swinton). Wrap it in a bow and play some music that’s “pretty” in syrupy ways. On that score (literally), my longtime standard that if a movie soundtrack is as obvious as banging a hammer on your thumb, it’s overdone. It astounds me that Alberto Iglesias copped a few awards in Europe, as his music is like hitting that thumb with a concrete block.

 

Moore modulates her moods as needed: sympathetic, scarred bunny, feminist rage, mothering…. You can see why the role might have resonated with a 64-year-old who remains gorgeous, but can see the future. I was, however, surprised that Swinton, one of my favorite actors, was stiff and unconvincing. Even her “American” accent was off; you can hear the King’s English popping out in numerous places. She is, of course, supposed to be mortally ill, but her entire demeanor is such that we know within a half hour there’s no chance she will choose a longer life. Thus, when Martha waxes rhapsodic about scenery or birdsongs, it removes for viewers what could have been an emotional break.

 

In short, Almodóvar has made a Hallmark movie filled with convention. There’s nothing innovative about this film, not even Swinton playing her own daughter. Give Almodóvar a Golden Turkey.

 

Rob Weir

More from the Stacks: The Horse, After This, Warlight, The Comfort of Ghosts

 

 

From the Stacks II

 

Here’s more from my literature clean out efforts, with more to come!

 

 

Sometimes fate thrusts a book into your hands you’d probably overlook otherwise. Such a novel is The Horse (2024, 192 pages), a short work from Willy Vlautin. An old musicians’ joke has it that life goes downhill the day you get a guitar. That’s the story of Al Ward, who got one from one of his mother’s boyfriends: a 1958 butterscotch Telecaster. Al wasn’t much for school, but he became a fine picker and composed hundreds of songs, mostly old-style country western, though he wasn’t keen on the genre. Vlautin tells Al’s story with a lot of flashback memories that takes us from the first time he went on the road, inside the truck stop bands that were going nowhere, and gigs with polished outfits that almost made it. In the present he’s living on inherited land in a Nevada ghost town that’s miles from anywhere. He survives on booze, music, Campbell’s soup, old memories, and few old compadres who help out. One day a blind horse wanders onto his property that triggers–see what I did there– memories of heartbreaks and losses. What does a guy who has been mostly reactive, lives as a hermit, and knows nothing about horses do next? It’s a poignant tale that’s by turn poignant, funny, and sad. ★★★★

 

 

 

How I love the literary prose of Alice McDermott. McDermott’s characters embody the broader changes in post-World War II American society. After This (2006, 279 pages)  introduces us to Mary, an Irish-American gal in a Manhattan typing pool with sad sack Pauline. Mary ponders whether she will get married, but by page 19 she is Mrs. John Keane and well on her way to birthing four children: Jacob, Michael, Annie, and Claire. Manhattan gives way to blue-collar life on Long Island. John, a vet, has a limp from the war, but also bearing scars from being older than Mary and discomfort with how fast the world is changing. Jacob is named for one of John’s war comrades but is ridiculed for having a Jewish name and becomes reclusive. Michael, though, is a rambunctious kid with his toy soldiers and a bit of a troublemaker. Annie will be an early adopter of social mores; Claire, the youngest, is pious and saintly. After This takes us from the early 50s through the Nixon years of the 1970s and is full of unexpected surprises. John and Mary struggle to make sense of a life that’s not as they imagined it. I can’t begin to do justice to this amazing book in a capsule review, but suffice it to say that McDermott so expertly captures small details that define the Zeitgeists of the 1950s and 60s that you’ll feel the wax paper crumble, smell the Brylcreem, and experience John’s anxiety over Pauline, his ethnic neighbors, and the moral gap between duty and the Vietnam War. Seldom has the shift from a faith-based to a questioning society been captured with such elegance. ★★★★★

 

 

 

 

Speaking of great stylists, Michael Ondaatje fits that bill. Many readers (and film fans) know him for his Booker Prize-winning The English Patient, but if you’d like to delve into his writing more deeply, Warlight (2018, 285 pages) is a superb novel. It delves into the question of when a war ends. Warlight opens in 1945 after the defeat of Germany and flashes back to the days of the Blitz of London. As you imagine, London and much of Europe are years away from reconstructing what was destroyed by bombs and battles, but that’s not the rubble on the minds of Nathaniel or his older sister, Rachel. During the Blitz, their parents left them in the hands of Walter, whom they call The Moth. The official story is that their father had business in Asia and that their mother went to be with him. That’s untrue, but where did they go and why? Warlight is told mostly from Nathaniel’s point of view. To say that he and his sister had a very unusual path to maturity undersells matters. Warlight has some of the characteristics of a coming of age tale–education, first love, new experiences–but theirs is also a home through which other dodgy people pass, including The Darter, whom they suspect is a criminal. Imagine also misty morning drop-offs along the Thames, people with foreign accents, vague reassurances, trips to smuggle greyhounds to dog tracks, the return of a parent, a death, and Nathaniel’s 12-year-search for the truth. How all of this connects to a kid thatching a roof is yours to discover. ★★★★★

 

 

 

The Comfort of Ghosts (2014, 338 pages) is also set in England during and after World War II. Is has been billed as the final installment of the Maisie Dobbs mysteries of author Jacqueline Winspear. You need not have read them all to appreciate this one, though it helps to know that Maisie grew up on an estate where her parents were domestics, was a nurse during World War I, lost her husband, and became a ward/heir of the estate owners. She is also a psychologist and private investigator married to an American diplomat and has oodles of money. As a PI, she’s more like a middle-aged version of Jane Marple than a dashing Sherlock Holmes. After the war quite a few empty or partially destroyed domiciles became home to squatters hoping that owners would not return. A delirious, weakened man makes his way to one and is cared for by a group of fearful street children surviving by theft, subterfuge, and wit. As Maise investigates a sinister wartime plot, she will meet the children and their patient. Winspear takes us inside a wartime program of which very few people know. As in Warlight we see that what comes after a war is over can be as fraught as the war itself. Note, though, that the two books are quite different. There is more grit in Warlight; The Comfort of Ghosts is more genteel. ★★★ ½

Dreaming Walls: Old New York versus the New

 

Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel (2022)

Directed by Mya Duverdier and Amélie Elmbt

Magnolia Pictures, 80 minutes, not-rated

★★★★

 

Dreaming Walls is billed as a documentary, but it’s also a ghost story. The film looks at both a building and a cavalcade of artists, beatniks, bohemians, counterculture figures, celebrities, misfits, poets, punk rockers, and radicals who lived at or passed through New York City’s Chelsea Hotel. That’s a long list that includes: Dylan (both Bob D. and D. Thomas), Leonard Cohen, Salvador Dali, Jane Fonda, Alan Ginsberg, Ethan Hawke, Jimi Hendrix, Jack Kerouac, Willem de Kooning, Janis Joplin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Bette Midler, Marilyn Monroe, Phil Ochs, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Andy Warhol, and most of his “superstars.” Warhol famously used the hotel as the backdrop for his 1965 underground film Chelsea Girls.

 

Dreaming Walls is all the more a ghost story courtesy of the decision of directors Mya Duverdier and Amélie Elmbt to shoot much of it as “layered” movie with sharp focus present-day footage with shadowy stock film montage of past residents running in the background. The eerie soundtrack of Michael Andrews lends a paranormal feel, as does our discomfort at viewing the remaining fulltime residents of the Chelsea puttering their way around the construction rubble as the old 1883 building is slowly converted into a mid-century modern themed luxury hotel. With few exceptions–like multimedia artist Steve Willis–most of the residents living in rent-controlled spaces are husks of their younger selves whose occupancy will expire as soon as they do. We see artist Bettina Grossman and dancer/choreographer Merle Lister-Levine, who is our voiceover for much of the film, negotiating long detours with their walkers or seeking help with getting their parcels to upper rooms because of out-of-service elevators. Speaking of ghosts, 94-year-old Grossman died in 2022, as did Lister-Levine’s elderly husband. If you need any more ghosts, the Chelsea Hotel is where Sid Vicious was accused of murdering Nancy Spungen.

 

Whether or not you think Sid killed Nancy, the Chelsea Hotel was a dodgy place from the 1970s on. Sex, drugs, wild parties, deferred maintenance, the anarchic views of residents, celebrity tantrums, and a laissez-faire manager turned the Chelsea into something resembling a decaying/decadent commune. Dreaming Walls provides a quick overview of the Chelsea’s  circular path from a Gilded Age luxury hotel in 1883 to a residency hotel in the early 20^th century to a haven for non-conformists from the 1930s into the early 21^st century, and back to a luxury hotel after 2022. Plan on about $600/night if you want to stay there during high season these days. Through all of this old debates rage: old New York versus modern New York, gentrification versus cheap lodging, the morality of displacing long-time residents….

 

Whatever its iteration, it’s easy to see the Chelsea is, as architects say, a building with good bones. Amazing grill work, light fixtures, lounges, and public gathering places have been home to ground floor concerts, restaurants, office spaces, retail shops, and easy access for offbeat New Yorkers who weren’t living in Greenwich Village. 

 

Through it all viewers can’t help but think about the famous question posed by theologian/historian Francis Schaeffer in 1976: How shall we then live? As we hear Grossman speak of hanging original art in the staircase or watch barely mobile Lister pose a dancer draped over a railing, are we experiencing a reminder of how to live in a creative community or the last light of a played out aesthetic?

 

However we come down on such questions, we know the answer to where things are headed. It says volumes to know that this documentary won awards in Europe, but was off the radar screen in the United States. In the showdown between affordability and what the market will bear, counterculture and mainstream culture, and bohemians versus capitalists, on whom/what would you place your bets? Dreaming Walls is a fascinating film in which the final ghost is the Chelsea Hotel itself. The old Chelsea has become an artifact. Depending upon your personal values you can chant “The Chelsea is dead” or Long live the Chelsea.”

 

Rob Weir

No Hard Feelings? I Have a Few

 

 

 

 

 

No Hard Feelings (2023)

Directed by Gene Stupnitsky

Sony Pictures Releasing, 103 minutes, R (nudity, sexuality, language)

★★

 

No Hard Feelings is the kind of film that Hollywood critics too young to remember that good comedy has barbs not just dumb situations, label “charming.” Oh dear. Let me state from the get-go that the premise of this film is that 19-year-old Percy Beckman (Andrew Barth Feldman) spends a lot of the movie saying he does not want to have sex with Jennifer Lawrence. Now there’s a statement no man, woman, Vogon, or inanimate object would say–ever!

 

This is a coming of age film that riffs off American Pie, Risky Business, The Breakfast Club, and Clueless without the raunch of the first, the laughs of the second, the coolness factor of the third, or a (yes) a clue like the fourth. Director Gene Stupnitsky cowrote No Hard Feelings with John Phillips. It’s your standard boy-needs-to-lose-his-virginity movie whose only twist is that this is his parents’ point of view, not Percy’s. He is a smart but unpopular loner who stays in his room a lot and still considers his nanny a friend. Mom Allison (Laura Benanti) and dad Laird Beckman (Matthew Broderick) think that Percy needs to date and have sex before attending Princeton in the fall and are willing to give a car to a woman in her 20s who will school him in the birds and bees.

 

Stupnitsky and Phillips aver that this was an actual ad on Craigslist, which is a sad commentary on American society. Lawrence plays Maddie Barker, whose own car is about to be impounded by the ex-boyfriend she ghosted. Her traffic fines and lack of registration are among the many bills she owns as she tries to hold onto her deceased mother’s home in Montauk. This forces her to roller blade across town to the Beckmans’ upscale home and talk her way into the assignment, though she’s 32, not in her twenties. She first meets Percy at his job in an animal shelter–Chekov’s gun alert!–(barely) dressed in a skintight dress, heels, and straps that “accidentally” fall down to expose a breast. How “smart” can Percy be if he still thinks Maddie wants to adopt a dog?

 

At heart this is a movie about a cougar stalking her prey for purely materialistic reasons. The question of “Will they or won’t they?” could be seen as a big striptease, except that this happens much earlier in the film when Maddie browbeats Percy into going skinny dipping if she promises not to try to have sex with him. Huh? Call the White Cane Program! To sustain what The Mikado called “a bald and unconvincing narrative,” No Hard Feelings stretches matters by stitching in all manner of  threads: spitting out Long Island Iced Tea, getting sick at a graduation party, the contrast in date formal wear, Maddie’s friends who, like her, can’t afford to live in Montauk–shades of Mystic Pizza–and premature ejaculation. Are you doubled over with laughter yet? There’s also a wrecked car scenario cribbed from, yes, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I could almost hear Matthew Broderick thinking, “How in the name of Zeus, Odin, and Ahura-Mazda did I get so freaking old that my career has come to this?”

 

I should say, however, that both Feldman and Lawrence did well with what the script asked them to do. Feldman is the vacillator and Lawrence the vixen. Lawrence was praised for her physical comedy, which you can take with a small grain of salt given that the film and Lawrence also got Golden Globe nominations. One wonders, though, about tiny cameos for Zahn McClarnon (Native American), Hasan Minhaj (South Asian American), and Amalia Yoo (Korean/Puerto Rican American), which are color props to tick PC boxes. I’ll also give the film credit for introducing to me an unfamiliar term. Several reviewers blasted the film for “sexual grooming.” I guess that’s a known thing, but I had to look it up. (I also don’t think it applies as 19-year-olds are not minors under the law.)

 

Still, the DVD box sports a cover with the word “Pretty” over Lawrence’s head and “Awkward” over that of Feldman. If you wanted a two-word review, “pretty awkward” would suffice. Another short judgment might be: who would go through this for a used Buick?

 

Rob Weir