Throwing off the weight of oppression

 

   If you were looking for an evening's diversion, it might not occur to you to spend it hanging out with a group of Mennonite women living in an isolated community in a Latin American country.

   Grim, serious, and weighted by patriarchal oppression, Women Talking makes Amish country seem luxe by comparison.

   Forbidding and talky, director Sarah Polley's movie, adapted from a novel by Canadian author Miriam Toews, tells a reality-based story about women seeking libration from a calcified society that hides its sins behind a religious mask.

    And, yes, you read that “reality-based” sentence right. The story inspired by a 2011 event in Bolivia in which seven men from a Mennonite colony were convicted of rape. 

    The story focuses on the response of the colony's women. Outraged by men who drug them with cow tranquilizers, rape them, and then blame ghosts or demons, the women arrive at a point of decision.

   As a whole, the community's women are divided about what to do. So eight women form a kind of high council of the oppressed, retreating to a hayloft to discuss options that will impact the rest. 

    The women are able to talk frankly because the men have gone to town to bail out the attackers after the authorities intervened. We don't need to see the men because this isn't a movie with two sides: It's a movie about what happens when women no longer can tolerate a soul-crushing system.

   Three choices emerge: Do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. The men have given the women two days to decide to forgive them, so the clock is ticking. The faux rectitude of the men’s position —  only forgiveness will be tolerated — needs no further comment.

      Because the men have forbidden the women to learn to read or write, a black-sheep male (Ben Whishaw) has been selected as recording secretary. Whishaw's August occupies an uneasy position vis a vis the community. His mother was expelled for speaking her mind. He left and attended college but returned to become a teacher for the young men in the community. He’s an outlier.

      Frances McDormand, one of the movie's producers, appears briefly as a woman committed to upholding the prevailing order. 

       Mostly, the movie plays as an ensemble piece built around powerful actresses: Jessie Buckley, Rooney Mara, Judith Ivey, Sheila McCarthy, Claire Foy, and Michelle McLeod.

      As the women debate, we learn a bit about them. Mara's Ona, a woman with a dimpled beatific smile, has become pregnant after one of the rapes. August is in love with Ona, but the stern environment isn't exactly conductive to romance.

      Foy's character bursts with fury over the rape of her four-year-old daughter, a rage so powerful it frightens her.

      Few would argue with the movie's message. These women want equality, freedom to express themselves, and faith that isn't used like a cudgel, inducing resignation and despair.

      The last point is important; these are women of faith, influenced by the need to forgive and by religiously inspired pacifism. They don't want to abandon all they hold sacred. They're also reluctant to leave older sons, who may already have drunk the colony Kool-Aid.

      Polley and cinematographer Luc Montpellier cloak the movie's images in weighty browns. The visual environment matches the  strictures under which these women live, making it clear that throwing off its terrors won't be easy.

     Polley's cast embraces the variety of possible responses to the movie's central predicament, although it takes a while to keep track of who's who. And the characters sometimes feel as if they've been reduced to the positions they take.

    But then, in a way, they have been -- by the abuse they've faced. 

   Women Talking might have been more powerful had it been presented on a stage, where it could have benefited from the kind of theatrical electricity that creates its own urgency.

     In the end, though, Women Talking gets under the skin and its shocking story compels. Polley makes us want to escape this stifling, barren world in which obedience has conquered love.

     Put another way, we want these woman to find the new lives they've only begun to imagine.  

     

A stark and powerful 'Macbeth'

 

   The Tragedy of Macbeth is a film from a Coen brother.

    I put it that way because director Joel Coen takes on  Shakespeare with The Tragedy of Macbeth and, yes, it feels weird to talk about a film with the name Coen attached without following with the word "brothers."

    The result of Joel Coen's solo effort is visually striking, intense, and bursting with fury.

     Employing an old-time aspect ratio and cutting through dark swaths with paths of white light, Coen simplifies the movie’s environment while simultaneously amping up its power.

     He opts for minimal but suggestive design. A castle still feels like a castle — albeit one you might find in an Ingmar Bergman film.

     I begin there because what stayed with me about Coen’s movie was its atmosphere and visual poetry, the way Coen married Shakespeare and back-and-white imagery of cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel.

    Coen and his team allow Macbeth to strike its own pose. And I don't mean "pose" in a pejorative sense, I mean it the sense of a movie that has the power of a starkly drawn silhouette.

    Coen isn’t trying to make Macbeth feel “real;” he bends cinematic convention to allow Shakespeare’s story and language a place where tragedy gathers force.

    A grizzled Denzel Washington provides the centerpiece of the drama. Washington doesn’t underline the play's great monologues  ("Tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow"). You won’t catch him orating; he delivers the dialogue as if it were his own speech.

    Washington's performance brims with emotional undercurrents, perhaps driven by the guilt that accrues to Macbeth as a result of killing his king (Brendan Gleeson) and then slaughtering rivals and their families. He even turns on his best friend and ally Banquo, a fine Bertie Carvel.

    Lady Macbeth (Frances McDormand) encourages Macbeth in his murderous ways, prompted by the king’s announcement that he plans to make his son Malcolm (Harry Melling) his successor. 

    Washington makes Macbeth's attitude less a matter of naked ambition than of reaction to a slight: Macbeth, who looks ready for an AARP membership, fought tirelessly for the king and never got his proper reward. If his anger has a modern equivalent, it's getting passed over for a promotion someone thought he had earned.

    All the actors rise to the occasion. Corey Hawkins makes a fine Macduff, perhaps the best and most human of the characters.

    Coen does a wonderful job with a bizarre and unforgettable performance from Kathryn Hunter as the witch who offers her prediction: Macbeth will be Thane of Cawdor and then king. Coen suggests the presence of Shakespeare's three witches by using a reflecting pool and adding ominous circling crows. 

   Hunter's performance is haunting enough to take the place of a half dozen witches, had Shakespeare wanted to increase their number.

   Coen’s Macbeth seldom finds itself idling and, thanks to a pared-down text, moves quickly toward a conclusion in which he makes it clear that, for him, Macbeth speaks loudly about dark forces that can be unleashed but seldom controlled.  

   This Macbeth screams when it needs to scream.

Wes Anderson's insular ‘Dispatch’

     Wes Anderson is an artful filmmaker and master miniaturist, a director who knows how to situate his films in the rich stream of cinema history. He's idiosyncratic and hardly ever seems to make a film in which his main objective is to soothe an audience. These are admirable traits and also the reasons why I always scold myself when I can't fully get behind an Anderson film.

   That's the case with The French Dispatch, a movie  apparently intended as a tribute to great magazine journalism. 

   Bill Murray plays the editor of the French Dispatch. Headquartered in the city of Ennui along the Blasé river, the Dispatch has built its reputation on the power of the written word and the idiosyncratic journalistic eye.

    Murray articulates two rules for those who work for the Dispatch. Don't cry and write in a way that makes it seem as if you did it on purpose.

   The plan: When Murray's Arthur Howitzer Jr. dies, the paper dies with him -- perhaps Anderson's way of acknowledging the disappearance of Great Editors; i.e., editorial titans who knew how to work with "difficult" writers -- and had never heard of focus groups, much less consulted one.

    An anthology divided into three parts with a prologue, the movie focuses on the Dispatch, a New Yorker-like publication complete with a table of contents and drawings. The meat of the movie involves three Dispatch feature pieces presented in black-and-white, color, and mixtures of the two.

    First among them, The Concrete Masterpiece, a story in which an art maven (Tilda Swinton) talks about a brilliant rebel painter named Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro). 

   Imprisoned for murder, Rosenthaler uses a prison guard (Lea Seydoux) as a model. Adrien Brody enters the story as an art dealer who wants to exploit Moses's work -- and is, therefore, outraged when Rosenthaler produces frescos on the prison's walls. How the hell can those be sold?

   The best and most genuinely bizarre of the three pieces, The Concrete Masterpiece features Del Toro as a genius who seems to have separated himself from the constraints of ordinary morality. 

   Next up, Revisions to a Manifesto featuring Timothee Chalamet and Frances McDormand. McDormand plays a writer caught up in what looks like the student rebellion of 1968. She develops a relationship  -- as a kind of mentor and sexual partner -- for Chalamet's character, leader of a student revolt. She also crosses  an ethical line, helping Chalamet's character write a manifesto. 

   By the time of the second movie, I found myself asking just how much quirkiness and intricate detailing I could tolerate. 

   OK, part three, The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner. Jeffrey Wright portrays a writer who's working on a profile of a chef. Listening to Wright's delivery of the segment’s abundant dialogue has its rewards. But Private Dining Room, which also makes room for animation and crime, seems crowded to the point of indulgence.

   Almost every Anderson movie has a finely etched quality as well as a whimsical sense of humor and French Dispatch is not without those qualities. Still ....

   I wouldn’t say that Anderson has chiseled the life out of his movie; it's more that the chiseling almost becomes the life of an intricate inward-looking movie that carves out a place for itself — but not always for an audience. 

   Is it possible for a movie to talk to itself?

McDormand bristles in 'Three Billboards'

In the town of Ebbing, Missouri, things aren't going well.

Mildred Hayes doesn't brood. After her daughter was raped and murdered on a stretch of lonely Missouri highway, Mildred ran out of patience with the local police for failing to locate a suspect and make an arrest. Mildred took matters into her own hands, renting three rundown billboards outside of her hometown of Ebbing, painting them red and advertising the fact that the police chief dropped the ball.

"Raped While Dying." "And Still No Arrests" "How Come Chief Willoughby?"

Mildred's bold move upsets the police and the townsfolk of Ebbing, Mo. But here's the thing: Mildred doesn't give a damn who she offends. She's angry, grief-stricken and intent on obtaining justice for her departed daughter.

Director Martin McDonagh's often funny third feature, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, brings the British/Irish director to the American heartland for a movie that proudly displays its wild variations in tone. Three Billboards makes its mark as a genre farrago: it's a dark comedy, a profane assault on authority figures, a diatribe about small-town hypocrisies and a comedy built around characters whose speech boils with profanities.

Frances McDormand receives showcase space from McDonagh as Mildred, a woman who spreads her venom the way bees pollinate flowers -- liberally. No one is spared: not the terminally ill Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), not Mildred's son (Lucas Hedges), not her former husband (John Hawkes), an unreliable fellow who left her for a 19-year-old (Samara Weaving), and certainly not police officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell), a dim-bulb of a cop with a vicious streak and a reputation for racism.

The British born McDonagh (In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths) occasionally seems to be straining to hit notes of political incorrectness as he reveals the blatant homophobia and racism of some of his characters. But touching moments and genuine expressions of feeling also turn up as characters are brought face-to-face with their humanity -- often under terrible circumstances.

Whatever its ambitions, Three Billboards derives its charge to McDormand; Mildred is so furiously committed to her own truth that she doesn't hesitate to provoke, even tossing the local priest out of her home. Of course, Mildred's language proves significantly less polite than a simple invitation for the priest to leave.

The movie's intemperate characters sometimes soften: A bit of homespun wisdom emerges from an unlikely source or a touch of decency is expressed by a character such as Rockwell's Dixon, a comic-book-reading cop who may be too stupid to know how thoroughly reprehensible he can be.

To keep everything slightly off balance, McDonagh sometimes mixes brutal and tender sentiments in the same scene. His approach creates ragged edges, but, like his main character, McDonagh may not care. Three Billboards takes its cues from McDormand, who infuses Mildred with uncompromising strength, the kind that allows a formidable woman to go toe-to-toe with any man and strike fear into his trembling heart. She marches to her own drummer and is more than ready to knock down anyone who stands in her way.

The Coens take on '50s Hollywood

Great cast, but Hail, Caesar! is enjoyable only in bits and pieces. Fortunately, some of those bits are inspired.

Despite the exclamation point in its title, the new Coen brothers film, Hail, Caesar!, isn't the sharpest or most emphatic of their many amazing efforts. A collection of sketches that both satirize and celebrate Hollywood of the 1950s, Hail, Caesar! lands the Coens in what for them is strange terrain: They've come up with a middle-ground addition to their idiosyncratic oeuvre with -- and this deserves underlining -- touches of entertaining brilliance.

There's a whisper of a story here: Fictional Capitol Studios finds itself in the midst of a major production. The movie is called Hail, Caesar!, and it carries the same heavily freighted subtitle as Ben-Hur, A Tale of the Christ. The plot, which offers echoes of The Robe focuses on a hardened Roman officer who eventually sees the light, rapturously submitting to a new faith when he encounters Christ on the cross.

Capitol's mega-buck epic stars Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), a slightly dissolute movie star who is also slightly dim.

During the filming of a scene, Whitlock is drugged and spirited away by extras who demand a $100,000 ransom. As it turns out, they are rebels with a cause, leftist screenwriters enamored of the Soviet Union who meet regularly to be lectured by Professor Marcuse (John Bluthal), an unveiled reference to Herbert Marcuse, a hero of the New Left during the 1960s.

It falls to Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), the studio's tough but perpetually burdened mogul, to return Whitlock to the set so that his mega-production can wrap. Eddie's part businessman and part fixer, a guy who's accustomed to covering the tracks of the studio's frequently wayward stars.

Eddie Mannix is modeled on a real-life MGM studio fixer of the same name. Here, Mannix is treated as decent but beleaguered man who's trying to keep the studio from running aground -- not an easy task when its stars have a penchant for landing themselves in embarrassing positions.

As Eddie puts out one Hollywood fire after another, he also entertains an offer from Lockheed, which wants to give him a high paying job that would allow for a more regular and presumably respectable life.

Now, very little about the plot matters. What makes the movie palatable are several winningly ludicrous snippets from Capitol's movies. Think of them as footnotes that are more interesting than the main body of the work.

One of the best involves a bone-headed decision to turn the studio's acrobatic cowboy star into a romantic lead, jamming him into comedy in which characters dress to the nines and speak in the kind of faux British -- or British-ish -- accents that were popular in some movies during the '30s and '40s.

Director Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes) is stuck with this egregious piece of miscasting. The scene in which Laurentz tries to prepare cowboy Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) for sophisticated patter might be enough to justify the price of admission.

The same goes for brief appearances by Tilda Swinton, who plays two roles -- gossip pedaling, twin columnists Thora and Thessaly Thacker. Listen to the way Swinton says Eddie's name, giving it a twist that evokes the pleasures of a whole era of studio filmmaking.

And if you don't smile during a production number featuring Channing Tatum as a tap-dancing sailor who, along with his shipmates, contemplates life at sea without "dames," you're in an even worse mood than I usually find myself in.

And then there's a broadly comic bit involving Frances McDormand as C.C. Calhoun, a chain-smoking film editor.

For me, those were highpoint to be savored, along with numerous small touches.

Alas (to be as stilted as some of the dialogue in Capitol Studio's productions), not all of the sketches work so well. Though beautifully produced, an Esther Williams' style swimming number featuring Scarlett Johannson might have been included just to show that the Coens could do it.

Johansson plays DeeAnna Moran, a pregnant movie star who forces the studio to find ways to cover the fact that she's not married. Her story eventually leads to Jonah Hill, whose role amounts to little more than a forgettable cameo. Hill plays Joseph Silverman, a man who specializes in "personhood," a joke that's not really worth the trouble of explaining.

In A Serious Man, the Coens took on religion; their attempts to do the same here aren't nearly as rich. The movie opens with Mannix in a confessional booth where he establishes himself as a serious Catholic who's addicted to confession. Mannix feels guilty because he lies to his wife about having quit smoking, but his real guilt comes from working so hard to support a morally dubious and often lunatic enterprise.

Stretches of Hail, Caesar! proves only mildly amusing and some of the humor built around the Hail, Caesar epic struck me as more obvious than we expect from the Coens who've taken swipes at Hollywood before, notably in the feverishly brilliant Barton Fink.

Hail Caesar! may not rank at the top of Coen's impressive list, but it should do nothing to sour anyone on their work. My advice: Treat the movie as a smorgasbord. Pick what you like; forget the rest.

No dramatic bounty in 'Promised Land'

Credit Matt Damon, who co-wrote the new movie Promised Land with actor John Krasinski, for tackling a difficult subject. Too bad, Damon and Krasinksi didn't come up with a stronger, more credible script for their movie about issues facing a small rural town when a natural gas company starts dangling major money for fracking rights.

Granted, it's difficult to make a dramatic feature about a subject as controversial and complicated as fracking, but the details in Promised Land don't always compute and a less-than-credible late-picture plot twist limits the movie's power.

Promised Land reunites Damon with director Gus Van Sant, who directed Good Will Hunting (1997), a movie that won screenwriting Oscars for Damon and his then partner Ben Affleck. Van Sant also directed Gerry (2002), a movie that Damon wrote with Casey Affleck and Van Sant.

This time, Damon -- who has appeared in all the movies he's written -- plays Steve Butler, a representative for a natural gas company. His assignment: buying drilling rights from economically stressed farmers. On the verge of a major promotion, Steve is one of the company's best closers, a guy known for achieving success while offering farmers rock-bottom prices. Needless to say, Steve doesn't say much about dangers posed by fracking.

Steve's success stems from his ability to relate to farmers. He grew up on an Iowa farm, and understands that most small farmers are struggling to make ends meet. He views his company's offers as a kind of salvation for farmers -- and, to the movie's credit -- there's some truth in Steve's pitch. Why should farmers sacrifice the future of their families for some romanticized, and in Steve's view, misplaced loyalty to the land?

Steve plies his trade with a down-to-earth partner (an underutilized Frances McDormand), a good-humored, no-nonsense woman for whom the work is just that -- a job, a way to support her son and earn a living. An eye-on-the-ball gal, McDormand's Sue doesn't waste time entangling herself in moral issues.

All seems to be going well for these representatives of Global Gas in their latest assignment until a town meeting at which a high-school science teacher (Hal Holbrook) raises questions about dangers associated with fracking. Holbrook's Frank Yates also wonders whether the promised rewards aren't being exaggerated.

Damon, Krasinksi and Van Sant have a feel for small-town life in an agricultural community and for how reps for a natural gas company might operate. When Steve and Sue arrive in town, they stop at a local store to buy clothing that they hope will make them look more like the town's residents.

But the movie falters when it comes to other details and perhaps even in the way Damon's character develops. First off, I found it difficult to believe that a born-and-bred Iowa farm boy such as Steve wouldn't know how to strive a stick-shift car; the movie uses Steve's difficulty with stick shifting as a running joke.

And when an environmentalist (Krasinski) shows up to warn the townspeople that fracking can result in dead live stock and poisoned land, the movie starts to feel contrived.

Obviously, the script builds toward a crisis of conscience for Steve, but that, too, stuck me as a stretch. This isn't Steve's first rodeo. You'd think he already would have worked out any moral issues stemming from the work he does. He seems a little too naive.

Are we supposed to believe that Steve begins to see new light because he meets an appealing woman in town (Rosemarie DeWitt)? Or is he thunderstruck when he receives revealing new information about the mammoth company that employs him? Maybe he never entirely abandoned his farm-boy roots.

You get the picture. Good intentions don't always make for a good movie, and although Promised Land captures some of the informalities of small-town life and, commendably, tries to find a bit of balance, it falls short both as a character study of a conflicted oil rep and as an expression of agitated social conscience.

Welcome to Wes Anderson's dollhouse

Moonrise Kingdom is intermittently amusing, distinctive and not always easy to digest.



I loved director Wes Anderson's last movie, an animated adaptation of Fantastic Mr. Fox, a children's story by Roald Dahl. For me, over-the-top admiration for an Anderson movie isn't the norm. Watching Anderson's latest -- Moonrise Kingdom -- reminded me that my responses to Anderson's work usually are more complicated and far more mixed than with most directors.

Typically, I find myself admiring Anderson's skills and impressed by what seems to be his unwavering commitment to the peculiarity of his own sensibilities. Inevitably, there will be places in an Anderson film where I chuckle, perhaps ruefully. These amusing moments often involve Bill Murray, who has appeared in such Anderson films as Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, The Royal Tenenbaums and, of course, Rushmore.

But if Anderson's audience divides into fans and non-fans, I lean away from fandom.

You probably can see where I'm headed in writing about Moonrise Kingdom, perhaps the most Andersonian of Anderson's films, a tiny story built around artful set decoration, distinctive imagery and a story that seems to be taking place in a universe composed of elements that have been tweaked just enough to throw them out of whack. The look of a Scout camp in Moonrise Kingdom, for example, suggests a Norman Rockwell painting -- only drained of nostalgic exultation.

For me, watching an Anderson movie is like marching at attention rather than walking. There's not much room for meandering. Anderson's works seem made to be appreciated in a certain way, and even when I think I see what Anderson is getting at, I have trouble totally connecting to his movies.

This time, Anderson tells the story of Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) and Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward). What's different about Sam and Suzy's love-at-first-sight tale? Sam and Suzy are 12-year-olds making their way through the summer of 1965. They fall in love before either their bodies or their minds are prepared for romance.

Sam, we learn, is an orphaned member of the Khaki Scouts, a stand-in for the Boy Scouts. He's attending scout camp on the fictional island of New Penzance, off the Massachusetts coast. Suzy Bishop lives on the island with her family -- mom, dad and three brothers. Suzy and her siblings listen to Benjamin Britten recordings on her portable phonograph. She often has her nose buried in a book. On the surface, things look normal enough, but the rooms of the Bishop house can seem like isolation chambers.

It's hardly surprising that Suzy's parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand) object when their daughter runs off with Sam. Suzy's parents enlist the help of the local sheriff (Bruce Willis), who also happens to be having an affair with McDormand's character. Sam's scoutmaster (Edward Norton) frets about the situation, and a social worker (Tilda Swinton) threatens to return Sam to foster care or maybe place him in an orphanage.

The adults in the movie are not quite ogres nor are they exemplary. Both Murray and McDormand are playing attorneys, characters who have acquired material success, and who want to expose their children to culture, but who also seem miserable -- at least in the non-emotive way of most Anderson-created characters. The trick for Anderson's actors seems to involve presenting outlines that can be colored in by the audience's crayons -- assisted, of course, by the occasional sharp line of dialog in Anderson and Roman Coppola's screenplay.

Toward the end of the movie, one adult -- a scoutmaster played by Anderson vet Jason Schwartzman -- offers to marry Sam and Suzy, cautioning them to think seriously about what they're doing. This bit of silliness provides an instance in which Anderson's approach works well. Schwartzman's offer makes no sense. but it connects Sam and Suzy with a co-conspirator who's willing to accept their view of things.

At one point, I wondered whether Suzy -- with her affectless delivery -- and Sam -- with his goggle-eyed glasses -- might not be more at home in an artfully drawn comic strip than in a movie. During their lovers' flight, Suzy invites Sam to French kiss and touch her breast. Sam complies, but in the typically inexpressive fashion that Anderson favors. Suzy and Sam don't seem like kids discovering their sexuality; they're puppets in Anderson's playhouse.

All of this builds toward a major flood of the island, which makes sense because Sam and Suzy met while Suzy was preparing for an appearance in an amateur production of Britten's opera Noye's Fludde (Noah's Flood). I guess if Sam and Suzy had their way, the Earth would be flooded, the rest of humanity would be wiped out and they would walk hand-in-hand onto a waiting ark, sole survivors of a necessary conflagration.

Sam, in particular, is a kind of outcast. Until a heroic turnaround by one of his fellow Scouts, he's scorned by boys his own age. Even the foster parents who had been caring for Sam don't want him back.

Those who enjoy visiting these Anderson-created worlds seem to like them very much. I appreciated Moonrise Kingdom in a whacky sort of way that did not always equate with either enjoyment or illumination. My feelings about Anderson's work remain unresolved.

If you're looking for a different take on the '60s -- or more precisely -- if you're interested in the continuing ramifications of life in the '60s, you may want to check out Peace, Love and Misunderstanding, director Bruce Beresford's seriocomic look at the present-day conflict between a mother (Jane Fonda) and the adult daughter (Catherine Keener) she raised during the free-and-easy, pot-smoking '60s. Faced with divorce, Keener's Diane -- a successful New York attorney -- leaves Manhattan with her two children (Elisabeth Olsen and Nate Wolf) to visit her mother in Woodstock, N.Y., an iconic locale for peace, love, protest and marijuana. The resentment of children with "hippie" parents is a legitimate and under-explored subject, but Peace, Love and Misunderstanding mostly blows it. Fonda's character comes off as a shrill parody of '60s values, a woman stuck in a time warp -- but confident that it's the right place to be. Meanwhile, Diane's son Jake (Wolf) runs around Woodstock with a video camera, exercising his wannabe filmmaker muscles and introducing the dreaded film-within-a-film conceit. Peace, Love and Misunderstanding stands as an example of what happens when a lot of talented people are shackled to second-rate material. Much pot is smoked, but this one doesn't inhale deeply when it comes to working through its characters' very real issues.