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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
LOVELY,
STILL Everlasting love has lately has been symbolized in movies through immortal vampires. Lovely, Still features a couple who are just a few years shy of being that old, but who can still prove that true love never dies—only if love can survive this heavy-handed dose of sentimentality landing on it. The week before Christmas, elderly Robert Malone (Martin Landau) is so alone that he’s wrapping a present for himself and putting it under the tree in his suburban home. His clock radio wakes him each morning with jarringly cheerful holiday music just so he can mechanically go through his morning chores, cross another day off the calendar, and shuffle off to his job as a grocery bagger. His curiosity is briefly piqued by two new neighbors moving in across the street, an older mother (Ellen Burstyn) and her adult daughter (Elizabeth Banks), but the matron disrupts his routine considerably more when she pops into his house. She’s Mary, and she has been watching him at the store, sketching in his off hours. He’s certainly freaked out by this intruder suddenly appearing inside his house, but she calms him with her neighborly concern as she sets out to aggressively charm the pants off him, day by day through the holiday. Before their quaint date nights sweetly play out, he first has to undergo condescending dating advice from his chirpy young boss (Adam Scott), who is no hit with chicks himself. The whirlwind romance between the extraordinarily naive Robert and the caring and confident Mary is charming enough when just the two are on screen (and who knew there are such romantic carriage-horse rides in downtown wintry Omaha?). But clues telegraph a heart-tugging twist coming around the corner as some emotional interactions start not quite making sense. Each night, Robert’s sleep is disturbed by dreams of flickering images that look like interstitial close-ups of blood-red arterial or neural pathways. There’s an artful feint or two to tease the audience before the teary truth is climactically revealed. Debut writer/director Nik Fackler’s youth shouldn’t be the issue for why this is a weak story about characters his grandparents’ age. Though he wrote the original script when he was a teenager, he filmed it when he was just a couple of years younger than Sarah Polley when she directed her brilliant first film, Away From Her (2006), a realistic and empathetic portrait of time’s toll on elderly lovers. Just as inexplicable is the treacly music by Fackler’s fellow members of the indie rock band Bright Eyes. Even the selected versions of Christmas carols are unimaginative, topped by a wincingly schmaltzy version of Fiddler on the Roof’s “Sunrise, Sunset” that is stuck in among the twinkling Christmas lights as if this were a high school winter holiday concert that required token ecumenicism. These
renowned actors have not only done superior work in the distant
past, but they continue to do so now elsewhere—so the fault is not in
the stars but in the filmmaker.
Nora Lee Mandel
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