Some of my friends ask me why I watch so much trash. Why I spend so much time with stuff that doesn't seem important. Here's one reason why. Sometimes an apparently offhand movie, made for simple consumption will surprise you.
This is being celebrated as a quirky little comedy with serious overtones. According to the expected date formula, it ends happily.
But that's not what I saw. I saw a serious work, by a serious young artist that I would like to see more of. I saw Hartley's influence without knowing the background. If you don't know Hartley, he's a Canadian filmmaker that makes small films. They are called quirky by mainstream movie reviewers. What else are they to say? Its a catchall notion that signifies something that works by using unconventional means but the reviewer cannot say why.
Hartley's films are highly abstract. They are often called stylized, but that usually applies to theatrical conventions. Hartley abstracts in a different dimension of his own. Its abstraction, not simplification. And it usually works because he gets actors that know how to collaborate in it well.
One of these was Adrianne Shelly. A redhead.
She took that level and type of abstraction and did something Hartley couldn't do: she folded her own life into the thing. The story is about her, her marriage and pregnancy. It was written while she was pregnant and at the end features her own daughter as the result of that pregnancy. She writes, directs and acts, but the role she has chosen is not the central one. The narrative stance is as the observer. All the abstraction is done on the observer side.
Its amazingly effective and consistent.
One device that works rather well is how her own approach to the film deviates from the norm. (The norm here is set in the first few minutes as a date movie.) She folds that into how her character deviates from the norm in designing and making pies. The diner is conflated into a theater, with poetry seductions, affairs, a wedding.
Its where we see the small, important and original work of Hartley blossom.
(The filmmaker was murdered before seeing the film in theaters.)
See this. Its good, even the use of Andy Griffith. And the small (one scene) but important role of the other redhead.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
