Directed by: Jonathan Demme
Starring: Anne Hathaway, Bill Irwin, Debra Winger, Anna Deavere Smith
It strikes me that Jonathan Demme wanted to make a concert-party movie and threw in some drama to give it a little shape. I found the combination elusive, even though I enjoyed some of the performances. The principal actor – Anne Hathaway – does a good job. Her acting is compelling, as is her screen presence, and she rises to the challenge of a fairly interesting role. But, though her role enables her to work her stuff to some degree, the dramatic setting limits her, as it does the other actors. The most shameful oversight is Anna Deavere Smith, who does not really get used at all. Bill Irwin is used as a clown – a role that, in clownish contexts (Fool Moon, on Broadway, twenty or so years ago), he does compellingly – but here it just seems overdone. It is a nice surprise and a real pleasure to see Debra Winger on screen, and, though she is a good actress, she also gets underused here. Because of a miscalculation of tone in the movie, both the drama and the exuberance seem to founder. They bang against one another relentlessly and leave the viewer emotionally confused. The movie wedding – the cause for the party – involves an interracial couple, and not a bit of drama or interplay goes on about that – just a kind of exuberance on all sides, a total love fest that is not very believable and which seems like an occasion for a director to try to rev up undirected energy in a cast, not to get them to convey a point about the story they were there to tell.
– BADMan
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