I came to this film knowing only that it was written by the excellent Nicholas Kazan (At Close Range, Reversal of Fortune, Fallen) and was adapted from his own play. It is an interesting enough premise - a young woman, her much older uncle, and his disreputable friend, meet at the woman's invitation, one year after a previous meeting resulted in an assault. Unfortunately I have to report it is a film seriously flawed by a lead performance that vacillates between excessively theatrical and numbingly amateurish, and a dark little script that is poorly served by its adaptation. There are numerous exchanges that might have been acceptable on stage, given the inherent artifice of the theatrical experience, but within the realist boundaries of a film seem stilted (at best) and awkward, unbelievable filler in an overtly theatrical speechifying that rings false, otherwise (and we're not just talking about the heightened language of a Chayefsky or Sorkin). Characters make observational leaps that are not so much earned by their insight but because it links one speech to the next. Sadly, multiple opportunities are missed to show us character's interactions (like the young lady and her uncle), and instead we are given individuals telling us about those interactions. And although the structure attempts to be filmic (intercutting between the two meetings as opposed to letting them play out chronologically) the piece is laboriously stage-bound and, at a brief 73 minutes, still feels like a much shorter one-act play padded painfully to reach even that time limit. With only three characters the story seemed primed for perhaps a Rashomon-like examination of circumstances, or how individuals prejudiciously view their own behavior and culpability, but instead we get an older man lecturing a young woman on how everybody should be cynical, and it all feels like points being made by an author instead of lives being examined. The inevitable revenge, although darkly original in a classical Greek tragedy sort of way, does not involve us because none of the characters feel real.
The pivotal role is played by Maya Kazan (the writer's daughter), who is not up to the task (outside of community theater standards); she proudly exhibits her memorization of lines but shows no indication of having lived through any of what she describes. There seems intelligence in her performance, in a clever acting student sort of fashion, but she plays the role as if trying to communicate to the back rows of a large auditorium, not as a human being conversing with only two other people in the room. She could probably do much better work with a director watching out for her, but the film is not well served by the neophyte at its helm: it's competently, if unimaginatively, shot and I'm sure there were constraints on time and set-ups, but there is no excuse for not reigning in the theatrical performances, the uninteresting staging, and the obvious lack of understanding believable human interactions. It's as if the director was functioning solely as a traffic cop instead of laboring to find and expand the potential within a problematic script, and refine and elevate the well-intentioned performances of it's trio of actors. The writer, the performers, and the audience, all deserve more.
