Holy Crap!* "A Late Quartet"

I can't remember if I've ever watched a movie that took itself so seriously yet was virtually indistinguishable from a parody. "A Late Quartet" (2012), boasting a dream cast, plays like a goof on an earnest chamber drama.

A string quartet has been together 25 years, but they are endangered by a health scare -- their elder member, Peter (Cello, Christopher Walken), is exhibiting signs of early Parkinson's disease. This brings out the tension between the others. Robert (Violin II, Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Juliette (Viola, Catherine Keener) have a shaky marriage, not helped by the presence of their first violinist, Daniel (Mark Ivanir, mostly bouncing around since "Schindler's List" 20 years ago), with whom Juliette had a relationship before her marriage.

Robert likes to go jogging (perhaps Hoffman's toughest role ever) with lithe younger woman who likes to stretch a lot in front of him during their breaks from running. You know immediately that she'll somehow find Robert irresistible; maybe it's all the whining he does about how he should be first violin. (Or maybe he secretly confided to her just how puffy poor Keener looks in this role.) The movie uses the younger woman as nothing more than a plot device, immediately discarding her when she has served her purpose.

It's painful to watch Hoffman and Walken give it their all in the service of such horrible writing. The dialogue is beyond histrionic. (Newcomer Yaron Zilberman directs his own story, which he co-wrote with "reality-TV producer" Seth Grossman.) You get the sense that Hoffman and Walken got too deep into this project before it was possible to get out, so they just do their iconic shtick and hope they're not embarrassed in the end. But they're in the hands of a couple of hacks, and the result would make you cringe if it weren't so amusing in a secretly satisfying way. And I shuddered watching the actors valiantly pretend to play their instruments, ill-served by clunky cutaways to their musically skilled doubles.

Keener just doesn't bother to try here. She seems as weary here as she was in "Enough Said." I don't recall seeing Ivanir before, but it was fun to squint a bit and pretend that he was Eddie, the proprietor of the Las Vegas wedding chapel in "The Hangover." We get endless scenes of him lovingly hand-crafting bows. He also gives private lessons to Robert and Juliette's young adult daughter, Alexandra (Imogen Poots), and if you can't predict some naughtiness happening between them, then you've never seen a drama before. Alexandra also takes group lessons from poor old Peter, who is given numerous opportunities to spill pearls of wisdom about music and life.

Much of the early dialogue requires excessive exposition about string quartets and the classical music that they play. Whole swaths of the script seem lifted from Wikipedia entries. At other times, this plays like a collection of dramatic cliches from old made-for-television movies. We get a couple bickering in a cab before one of them orders the cabbie to pull over so he can get out. Poor old Peter is mourning his beloved wife, a soprano who died a year or so ago, and would you believe he sees a vision of her, in full voice, in his drawing room? Various characters watch video clips from a documentary about the quartet to help goose the back story, the epitome of lazy storytelling.

Why isn't this a total loss? First, I fast-forwarded a bunch of times, making it zip by quicker than its 106 minutes. Second, Poots brings genuine energy to the proceedings, providing a refreshing break from the overwrought bleatings of the A-listers; she actually seems like a real person rather than a narrative construct. And finally, the last 20 minutes aren't half bad. You know from the start that the whole film is building toward a final showdown onstage, and Walken finally pulls out of his tailspin and makes it at least plausible.

Most folks won't make it that far, though. This could have been another "Life Is short," but instead, I soldiered on and was rewarded with another "Holy Crap!" 

GRADE: C-minus

* - Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films, cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out previous entries here and here and here and here.