Archive | Reviews
‘Hateship Loveship,’ a Study in Earnestness
Hateship Loveship, starring Kristen Wiig, is far less blasé than the Alice Munro story on which it’s based. An excerpt from my Word and Film review :
We get the sense Munroe as narrator skims over the details of how a love match is made not out of prudery so much as a distaste for the obviousness of the whole business. “A woman not to be deterred, a man who’s lost his way? Eh, you do the math,” she seems to be saying, airily waving a rough-knuckled hand. In contrast, the film “Hateship Loveship” is a study in earnestness. To some degree this is a function of our times. The story has been updated to the contemporary Midwest from mid-20th century Canada, when stricter social codes were bound to engender subversiveness.
A Double of Doubles
In my latest essay for Word and Film, I focus on movie zeitgeists, in which a handful of films on the same topic come out at the same time. In particular I look at a recent double of “doubles”—Enemy (opening today), starring Two Jakes (Gyllenhaal), and The Double, starring a neurotic Jesse Eisenberg and a hustling Jesse Eisenberg. An excerpt:
Enemy, which opens this week, stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Adam, a hapless history teacher who feels threatened when he discovers Anthony, a small-time movie actor (also Gyllenhaal) who is his exact physical double. Directed by Denis Villeneuve, the film is based upon the Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago’s Portuguese novel The Double, a cheerless affair that tackles subjects like self-illusion in what seems like one endless, stream-of-conscious paragraph. The film veers from the book in some key ways – it’s set in Toronto and boasts such surreal touches as giant spiders and an “Eyes Wide Shut”-style sex club – but is no less grim. Gyllenhaal’s acting strength typically stems from his remarkable physicality but his “two Jakes,” perhaps taking their cues from the film’s gray and brown palette, are so lifeless that not even their gorgeous blonde mates (more mirrors!) can rouse them. Some of the problem lies with the normally deft Villeneuve’s one-note direction, which eschews any soulfulness – as though it would compromise his grinding theme of the elusiveness of identity in an empty world.
Here’s the rest, Sirenaders!