***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Catherine Keener, Brenda Blethyn, Emily Mortimer, Raven Goodwin, Jake Gyllenhaal, James Le Gros, and Dermot Mulroney
Directed & written by Nicole Holofcener
2002 R
Dozen-or-So Best Films of 2002
“Lovely and Amazing” is what you could call a neuroses-driven film. Critics and erudite audiences sometimes like to think that, unlike thrillers or romantic comedies, there’s no formula behind character-driven movies. But, like any good thriller, there’s a recipe to movies like “Lovely and Amazing;” it’s just that these movies don’t get made nearly as often, and the formula is in the hands of the writers and actors, instead of with the technical people.
A neuroses-driven movie is kind of like a mystery. We meet a character—or in the case of “Lovely and Amazing,” a group of characters—and we realize that there’s something wrong with her. We see her in action, going through life, work, and family. If her troubles are obvious, then we wonder how she got where she is, or how she’ll get out of them. If her flaws are hidden, and all we see are symptoms, then we’re curious about what they are. Layers are peeled back one by one, and she usually begins something of a self-examination, and shares her findings with us. When the genre is done well, her flaws are neither obvious, simple, nor are they used to beat us over the head. Unlike a mystery, a completed solution is usually unsatisfactory. The fun is that we’re always a little ahead of her, because of what the movie has shown us, but we’re never too far ahead. The story may surprise us, even shock us, but what happens makes sense with what has gone before; we don’t see anything coming, but when it arrives, it feels logical.
Catherine Keener of “Being John Malkovich” stars in “Lovely and Amazing” as a masterpiece of prolonged adolescence who fancies herself an artist. When we first meet her she’s cussing out the employees of an arts-and-crafts store who are unwilling to buy her miniature sculptures. Her approach to life is to use the “f” word on anyone who isn’t giving her what she wants. She tells her girlfriends about sex with her husband in the way a thirteen-year-old compares and competes with her friends about making out, and she flirts casually because she doesn’t treat him with the finality of marriage, but more like a steady boyfriend.
Her mother and sisters aren’t much better. Keener’s biological sister (Emily Mortimer) is a messy bundle of insecurities first and an aspiring actress second. Beanpole-thin, she is forever fretting over her appearance, and her self-esteem is always on a precipice. Her boyfriend (James Le Gros, the snooty actor from “Living in Oblivion,” which also starred Catherine Keener) sees all her worries as meaningless and is forever avoiding her with a mantra of “I have work to do.” “You need a girlfriend,” he eventually tells her as she forces another smile. “Someone you can talk about your arms and hair with.” Their mother (Brenda Blethyn), long ago divorced, is always harping on how wonderful the sisters are, yet how much self-worth can be acquired from a woman who begins the film by getting liposuction?
The family’s cycle of feeding each other’s inferiority complexes is most apparent with Blethyn’s adopted eight-year-old daughter. She’s played by the gifted and pudgy child actress Raven Goodwin, who is always thinking more than she’s willing to say; half the time she tries to hide those extra thoughts, and the other half she’s trying to insinuate them. The biological family is white, but Goodwin is black. “Lovely and Amazing” is too smart a movie to subject us to bigotry or brainless misunderstandings about race; the grown sisters accept Goodwin as one of them. Keener even talks to Goodwin like a teenager would, without concern for how she might damage the girl’s opinion of her foster mother. Like a good mother, Blethyn wants Goodwin to feel good about herself, and when she complains about how her skin and hair are not like her mother’s, Blethyn tells her her skin and hair are beautiful just the way they are. Good advice, yes, but it’s hard to believe Blethyn’s “good-just-the-way-you-are” rhetoric when she goes for liposuction, and Goodwin straightens her hair.
So that’s the set-up (obviously a summary can’t do “Lovely and Amazing” justice). Changes are set in motion in the lives of the three women when Keener’s husband forces her to get a job. Out of defiance she starts getting eight bucks an hour at a one-hour photo (luckily for her not the one-hour photo from “One-Hour Photo”), where her seventeen-year-old boss (Jake Gyllenhaal) has a crush on her. Mortimer gets an audition with a big star (Dermot Mulroney, also of “Living in Oblivion”) whom we first feel is repulsive, but we actually come to admire because he is so straightforward and honest about his sleaziness. Just like a girlfriend, he takes Mortimer’s complaints about her appearance completely seriously.
“Lovely and Amazing” doesn’t play any simple-minded sexist blame games. True, the men in the movie, except Mulroney and young Jake Gyllenhaal, are unwilling to see the concerns of the women as important, whether they be art, acting, or appearance-related. But “Lovely and Amazing” is also clear in showing that Keener’s art is mostly just a way to play on the floor of the living room and not get a real job, and that Mortimer’s concerns about her appearance are the kind that can only go away if a worldwide referendum were held to prove she is adequate.
Tone is crucial to “Lovely and Amazing.” A movie like this wouldn’t work if it were just miserable people listing their problems. Writer-director Nicole Holofcener gives us three troubled women, just like Stephen Daldry in “The Hours,” but while that movie is dour and heavy, “Lovely and Amazing” is playful, even cheerful about the problems of its women. The stories of the three women intertwine and unwind freely, and while “Lovely and Amazing” never strives for profundity, it is very observant and understands its characters.
Are there lessons to be learned from “Lovely and Amazing?” As we watch the three sisters and their mother feel worse and worse about themselves as they try to feel better, we learn how easily our off-hand comments to others can so effortlessly, unintentionally wound, and with enough wounds there might be a kill. Should we simply learn to be less sensitive to the thoughts and actions of others if we are to maintain our own sense of self-worth? Should we keep our wits about us and watch what we say more closely, lest we damage those around us? Probably, but “Lovely and Amazing” has too light a hand to say.
Finished February 16, 2003
Back to archive.
Copyright © 2003 Friday & Saturday Night