We saw this movie today as part of the monthly Camera Cinema Club program in San Jose. It's an independent film, based on a play written by David MacGregor. There are four characters: two married couples living next door to each other in suburbia. (The movie was filmed in Lincoln, Nebraska.) On Halloween, the couples get together and the hostess brings out a mysterious blue Peruvian wine made from the boiled skin of the blue dart tree frog--supposedly the same frog used to create poison darts. Drink this and you must tell the truth. Three of the four characters drink and what follows is more than an hour of some of the rawest truth you might hope to hear among four close neighbors.
It's not like this field hasn't been plowed before. Yasmina Reza's "God of Carnage" comes to mind as a recent entry in this two-couples-speak-truth trope but you can go all the way back to "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and probably further back if you like. There's plenty of material to mine and "Vino Veritas" mines the topic deeply and well.
This film is a comedy drama. It touches on so many land-mine subjects (life, death, truth in marriage, trials of parenthood, loss of a child, marital fidelity, sexual communication and power in marriage, loss of one's carefree youth, loss of ardor, terrorism, faith in God, and on, and on) that I simply lost count and waited for the next tick of the script. It's a high-velocity, zig-zag ramble through many, many topics and there's no way you're going to see when the next turn will occur or where it will take you. All that's required is the asking of a question to zig or zag to the next deep truth.
All four actors do a spectacular job in this 4-person film. It's so suburban in appearance that most viewers will be easily able to identify with the characters, which digs the topical hooks in even deeper. This is a thinking person's film with a heart. Comedy, drama, pathos. A rare delivery in today's film choices.
