12 August 2017

Monogamy in Mono


THE LOVERS (C+) - It's difficult to pin down what this is or what it wanted to be. The previews make it look like a screwball comedy -- a middle-aged couple, cheating on each other, rediscovery their attraction to each other -- but it's dour and downbeat, and in the end it unravels unconvincingly.

Debra Winger and Tracey Letts are refreshingly frumpy as the aging spouses, Mary and Michael, getting their kicks elsewhere while sleepwalking through their domestic routines. He has a kittenish dancer on the side, Lucy (Melora Walters), and she found a hunk with an accent and a full head of hair, Robert (Aiden Gillen).

Hectored by their respective lovers, Mary and Michael -- after too much throat clearing in the plot -- dive back into their own passionate affair. Now it is they who are exchanging cheeky texts and lying their way out of trysts with Lucy and Robert. It's a cute set-up. But it doesn't have a logical place to go.

So enter the final piece of the puzzle: their son Joel (Tyler Ross), who is coming home for a visit with his girlfriend, Erin (Jessica Sula), even though he openly despises his parents and is disgusted by their sham of a marriage. Joel is the apparent stand-in for writer-director Azazel Jacobs, because Jacobs thinks the Joel angle is so fascinating that it dominates the film's final reel. But why would most of us care what their son thinks about their marriage? Why is that interesting?

Jacobs, the son of an experimental filmmaker, appears to be tiptoeing into the mainstream after a pair of arch dark comedies the past decade, "Momma's Man" (2008) and "Terri" (2011). Here he is aiming for dramatic heft, and he has Winger and Letts approach the material in a lethargic, low-key mode, as if he filmed them at normal speed and then slowed it down in post-production. They pause before they speak, which probably isn't that unusual in real life, but on the big screen you suspect that the lead characters might be having a mild stroke.

It's an apparent stab at profundity, but it misses the mark. Lucy and Robert are barely fleshed out, and even Mary and Michael have endless amounts of free time, even during the work week.

Everything is surprisingly sedate. Letts has a nice moment toward the end with young Erin, reminiscing about the man he was when he met Mary, but by that point, with the son having inexplicable hissy fits about his parents' various degrees of fidelity, you just want this wrapped up.

When it does end, after 97 minutes, the tidiness of the resolution -- with a bit of a twist on a twist -- is too convenient, as if the studio ordered it pinned onto the final cut. It's fun to see Winger and Letts, a couple of aging boomers, sink their teeth into their respective roles. Unfortunately, Jacobs doesn't offer them, or the viewers, much meat to feast on.

BONUS TRACK
The climactic song is from Labi Siffre, a British singer-songwriter and poet, his 1972 tune "It Must Be Love," which sounds like a Brian Wilson composition when it starts out:


Madness had a Top 40 hit with it a decade later; Siffre showed up for a cameo in the video:



 

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