‘Lovely & Amazing’

An excellent cast, a character-driven story and a quirky family are the ingredients for success in Nicole Holofcener’s independent effort.   [R]

By: Bob Brown

Above, Dermot Mulroney (left) and Emily Mortimer have a fling, and Catherine Keener (below) is an unhappily married artist in Lovely & Amazing.

   Characters are the key to the most enjoyable films. If you can’t empathize or identify with their problems, a movie may just as well be special effects. That’s why Spider-Man, a blockbuster with an all-too-human superhero, had better box office than Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, a box of effects.
   Small films can pack as much punch as big-budget films. All you need is a thought-provoking script, good direction and actors devoted to their craft, rather than their pay.
   Such a film is Lovely & Amazing, a low-cost production written and directed by Nicole Holofcener. One of the picture’s economies is Plus 8 digital video. It’s not a pretty medium compared to film, and the sound is muffled. Those are among the film’s few disappointments. Ms. Holofcener, however, is not one of them.
   No stranger to feature-length films, she wrote and directed Walking and Talking (1996). Her latest effort is a character-driven piece par excellence. It progresses episodically through the lives of her characters, rather than through a linear plot. Commenting on her unconventional approach, Holofcener told an interviewer: "This style is just what comes naturally to me. I love ensembles and they seem to just structure themselves. When I was writing this, I let the characters tell me what to do next."
   Those characters are the three Marks sisters, Michelle (Catherine Keener), an unhappily married artist who makes miniature twig chairs to sell in craft stores; Elizabeth (Emily Mortimer), a small-time actress who struggles with auditions and an insensitive boyfriend; and 8-year-old Annie (Raven Goodwin), who was adopted by their mother, Jane (Brenda Blethyn), when Annie’s crack-addict biological mother could no longer care for her.
   Michelle and Elizabeth are 30-somethings looking at the downside of men and unemployment. Annie is black, looking at the downside of being in a white family.
   In assembling this family of women, Holofcener wanted to show how they would reflect and transcend their genes and their environment. She said she was "inspired to write about how children — biological or not — inherit their parents’ qualities and how they deal with and internalize them. Can they transcend their parents’ legacy or should they simply surrender to it?"

   Everyone in the family seems to run out of self-esteem. Each deals with it in a different way. One of the legacies that the 50-something Jane is passing on, by genes or osmosis, is an obsession with body appearance. It’s not an uncommon concern for women of any age, but for Jane it leads to major liposuction that brings her near death. Elizabeth, who is Calista Flockhart thin, is nevertheless ashamed of what she thinks are her flabby upper arms. To confirm this, she goes so far as to ask a fellow actor with whom she has a fling (Dermot Mulroney) to critique her nude body, head to toe.
   Michelle, on the other hand, projects this body obsession onto others. The portly little Annie, who continually forages for junk food, gets Michelle’s warning about the horrors of becoming a fat teen-ager, something Michelle never experienced as a homecoming queen.
   Michelle’s struggle is with growing up. Her idea of a job is hawking her tiny chairs to unsympathetic sales clerks in craft stores. (Holofcener says this comes from her own teen-age experience of trying to sell her art — except that she succeeded.) This leads to Michelle’s problem with anger management. Everyone in the family suffers frustration and suppressed rage, but Michelle’s recommended solution is to tell people to bleep off. Ironically, this bodily action is completely absent in her bedroom. The only sexual relationship she musters is a night with Jordan (Jake Gyllenhaal), the teen-age clerk in the one-hour photo store where she finally lands a menial job.
   Annie, as the adopted sister, is an earth-grounded, fundamental character. She picks up Jane’s concern about appearance but translates it into her own needs. "I wish I had skin like yours," she tells Jane. Wanting hair like her sisters’, she asks her "Big Sister" Lorraine (Aunjanue Ellis) to straighten it, much to her real sisters’ horror. In one of the film’s clever ironies, the black Lorraine finally gives up on looking after the willful Annie. Lorraine had joined the Big Sister program to help underprivileged black kids, but Annie doesn’t fit the mold. Besides, Annie’s idea of fun is pretending to drown during pool dates just so people rescue her.
   Holofcener is blessed with an excellent cast. They convey the quirks that delineate the characters, and the gravity that draws this offbeat family together. Especially fine are Catherine Keener, whose mouth and eyes portray two opposite emotions simultaneously, and young Raven Goodwin, whose understated portrayal of Annie suggests a girl wise beyond her years, having seen the worst of human nature, and the best.
   The film might be described by some men as a "chick flick." But it’s much more than that. It’s a movie about how you define your orbit of love and happiness among the people who are inescapably your solar system.
Rated R. Contains profane language and nudity.