Your enjoyment level with this movie will depend on two things.
1. Your appreciation of the lovely Laura Linney.
2. Your ability to appreciate individual elements that are quite good but don't come together to make a good film.
Louise Harrington (Laura Linney) is the director of admissions for the art program at Columbia University. She's 39 years old and divorced, but knows she's still attractive. Her ex-husband Peter (Gabriel Byrne) is a Columbia professor. They were married for ten years and now have one of those divorcée relationships that are supposed to be mature but are really just unhealthy. They have lunch together on campus and have regular dinners at each other's homes. Essentially, they're one of these couples who get divorced but then continue to carry on with about 80% of their married life together. Louise also has a larger-than-life best friend named Missy (Marcia Gay Harden) who lives across the country with her rich husband and scandalizes Louise with phone calls about lusting after the pool boy.
One day, after rejecting a series of applicants, she's stopped short by a letter. It's from a young man named F. Scott Feinstadt (Topher Grace) and Louise is completely taken aback by it. Even though his application isn't complete, she invites him for an interview and rather aggressively seduces him. It seems that Louise's high school boyfriend was named Scott Feinstadt. She loved him and then he died and now Louise is caught up with the wild idea her great love has returned to her. As you might guess, a budding romance between a woman and a young man she's thinks might be her dead boyfriend runs into a few snags. Louise also has to deal with a revelation from Peter that abnormally disturbs her and a simmering conflict with her recovering addict brother (Paul Rudd) before F. Scott finally finds out why Louise took a fancy to him.
There are a lot of things about this movie that work on their own but when they try to put them all together, it really doesn't click.
Laura Linney is splendid, as always, but she's playing facets of a character instead of a whole woman. At times she's wrapped up in a fantasy. Other times, she's got a very cold-blooded grip on reality. Sometimes she's very much in command and others she's very much affected by so many things. For a woman to so quickly and so strongly latch onto the "my dead boyfriend's come back to me" thing, she's got to be very sad and lonely and unhappy and a little pathetic. Linney tries all she can to convey all of that, but she's hampered by a story that doesn't understand or doesn't want to admit how messed up Louise must be.
Topher Grace looks and feels a little too old for this role, but his performance of a young artist is spot on. He plays him as genuinely young, with a fragile sense of himself and an unsettled relationship to the world.
The only unconvincing acting job of the movie is Marcia Gay Harden's, and I'm not sure it's her fault at all. Missy is less a character and more a living deus ex machina. Missy exists to facilitate the ending of this story, which means her behavior doesn't make sense as a human being but only as a servant of the Almighty Plot Hammer.
There are also two things about this story that are just too cute. For one, we're never really told the whole story about Louise and her high school boyfriend. Certain things are implied and we're clearly meant to assume that it was this great and wonderful love story. But then toward the end of the movie, we're told that it was much more mundane and common and even tawdry. It's like the movie plays a trick by letting you believe in this romantic fantasy and then dumps a bucket of cold water on you. The second problem is that the whole "he's her dead high school boyfriend" thing just sort of goes away in the middle of the film. It's ignored and we get about 30 minutes of a perfectly conventional story about an older woman infatuated with a younger man but still conflicted about his youth. We also get the stuff with Peter, which seems very contrived, and the stuff with Louise's brother, which only makes sense when the movie beats us over the head with what it's supposed to mean later on.
If you're a Laura Linney fan, she's just as good here as in her other films. A lot of those other films, however, are much better than this.
1. Your appreciation of the lovely Laura Linney.
2. Your ability to appreciate individual elements that are quite good but don't come together to make a good film.
Louise Harrington (Laura Linney) is the director of admissions for the art program at Columbia University. She's 39 years old and divorced, but knows she's still attractive. Her ex-husband Peter (Gabriel Byrne) is a Columbia professor. They were married for ten years and now have one of those divorcée relationships that are supposed to be mature but are really just unhealthy. They have lunch together on campus and have regular dinners at each other's homes. Essentially, they're one of these couples who get divorced but then continue to carry on with about 80% of their married life together. Louise also has a larger-than-life best friend named Missy (Marcia Gay Harden) who lives across the country with her rich husband and scandalizes Louise with phone calls about lusting after the pool boy.
One day, after rejecting a series of applicants, she's stopped short by a letter. It's from a young man named F. Scott Feinstadt (Topher Grace) and Louise is completely taken aback by it. Even though his application isn't complete, she invites him for an interview and rather aggressively seduces him. It seems that Louise's high school boyfriend was named Scott Feinstadt. She loved him and then he died and now Louise is caught up with the wild idea her great love has returned to her. As you might guess, a budding romance between a woman and a young man she's thinks might be her dead boyfriend runs into a few snags. Louise also has to deal with a revelation from Peter that abnormally disturbs her and a simmering conflict with her recovering addict brother (Paul Rudd) before F. Scott finally finds out why Louise took a fancy to him.
There are a lot of things about this movie that work on their own but when they try to put them all together, it really doesn't click.
Laura Linney is splendid, as always, but she's playing facets of a character instead of a whole woman. At times she's wrapped up in a fantasy. Other times, she's got a very cold-blooded grip on reality. Sometimes she's very much in command and others she's very much affected by so many things. For a woman to so quickly and so strongly latch onto the "my dead boyfriend's come back to me" thing, she's got to be very sad and lonely and unhappy and a little pathetic. Linney tries all she can to convey all of that, but she's hampered by a story that doesn't understand or doesn't want to admit how messed up Louise must be.
Topher Grace looks and feels a little too old for this role, but his performance of a young artist is spot on. He plays him as genuinely young, with a fragile sense of himself and an unsettled relationship to the world.
The only unconvincing acting job of the movie is Marcia Gay Harden's, and I'm not sure it's her fault at all. Missy is less a character and more a living deus ex machina. Missy exists to facilitate the ending of this story, which means her behavior doesn't make sense as a human being but only as a servant of the Almighty Plot Hammer.
There are also two things about this story that are just too cute. For one, we're never really told the whole story about Louise and her high school boyfriend. Certain things are implied and we're clearly meant to assume that it was this great and wonderful love story. But then toward the end of the movie, we're told that it was much more mundane and common and even tawdry. It's like the movie plays a trick by letting you believe in this romantic fantasy and then dumps a bucket of cold water on you. The second problem is that the whole "he's her dead high school boyfriend" thing just sort of goes away in the middle of the film. It's ignored and we get about 30 minutes of a perfectly conventional story about an older woman infatuated with a younger man but still conflicted about his youth. We also get the stuff with Peter, which seems very contrived, and the stuff with Louise's brother, which only makes sense when the movie beats us over the head with what it's supposed to mean later on.
If you're a Laura Linney fan, she's just as good here as in her other films. A lot of those other films, however, are much better than this.