A bestseller hits the screen

 

  I guess I'm behind the times. Or maybe it's because I don't hang out in bars anymore.  I probably don't read the right magazines, either. Whatever the reasons, I'm new to the idea that some men -- as in grown men -- wear onesies, one-piece garments once associated with toddlers. 

  I learned about this fashion statement while watching It Ends With Us, a big-screen adaptation of a best-selling novel by Colleen Hoover. In a scene that caught my eye, two men are wearing onesies in a bar. 

   If there's an implied meaning in this -- something about men stuck in childhood -- it eluded me. No matter. I'm not a member of the target audience for the movie, which stars Blake Lively as Lily Bloom, a Boston florist who falls for a neurosurgeon named Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni).  

    No offense to younger generations but if I ever need neurosurgery, I'm going to insist that it's administered by a physician who doesn't wear onesies.

  Directed by Baldoni, It Ends with Us dresses itself in the trappings of romance. Lily's stylish wardrobe sure as hell didn't come from a bargain basement. The characters dine in upscale restaurants, and no one's wallet seems pinched.

   After traveling to Maine for her father's funeral, Lily heads to Boston, where she tries to stake out a new life. Having quit an apparently good job, she's ready to fulfill her flower shop dreams.

   Lily soon meets Allysa (Jenny Slate), the character who assumes the story's best-friend duties. Lily hires Allysa, who evidently doesn't need a job to pay the rent but wants to help Lily upgrade the abandoned shop she'll soon turn into a trendy Boston retail spot.

    At this point, the story begins to trip over its contrivances. As it turns out, Allysa is also the sister of neurosurgeon Ryle and the wife of Marshall (Hasan Minhaj), a character I mention because he's also seen wearing onesies.

     We learn two things early on: Lily's father physically abused her mother (Amy Morton), and Ryle has a temper.  

     When Lily and Ryle first meet on the rooftop patio of a Boston apartment, Ryle smashes a chair in a fit of rage. He doesn't realize Lily is watching. 

     Lily's sitting on a wall, looking as if she might topple off the building's edge. She's probably contemplating her father's funeral. She was supposed to deliver the eulogy but couldn't find five good things to say about the man.

     To add more complication, Christy Hall's screenplay contrasts Lily's life in the present with her high school days. As a teenager, she developed a relationship with homeless kid Atlas (Alex Neustaedter). He's her first love, and, damn, if he doesn't turn up later as the owner of a trendy Boston eatery. 

      Does a love triangle loom?

      Brandon Skelnar plays the grown Atlas. For the record, Isabela Ferrer portrays the younger Lily

      Bear with me while I try to climb out from under the woods of the entanglements woven into the plot.

       Unless you're familiar with Hoover's 2016 novel, you might think I'm writing about a routine romance, one full of eye candy and gloss. But Hoover's book and its big-screen version give romantic fantasy a serious edge by shifting the story's tone to focus on domestic violence -- albeit without entirely abandoning the movie's earlier vibe.

      The mixture gives Lively, who holds the movie's center, a role that relies both on surface and depth. Lily slowly accepts the idea of entering a relationship with Ryle, a guy who has given off warning signals that his interest in women seldom gets beyond sex. 

     Baldoni's performance relies on his character's carefully cultivated charm, encouraging belief that he wants to shed his roving ways and find a lasting relationship. 

      I'll stop here because the rest involves the ways in which the story resolves.

      It Ends with Us may not have an audience beyond fans of the novel, although there may be enough of them to make for success. The book, after all, was on the New York Times bestseller list for 164 weeks and probably will get another boost from the movie's release.

      On the plus side of the melodramatic ledger, Baldoni deserves credit for showing how signs of impending violence often are ignored. Scenes involving physical abuse have undeniable impact, and, as the title suggests, the ending tries for hopeful assertion.

     At the same time, the movie's seductive slickness allows its seriousness to slide away too easily. So, I'll vacillate, as I think the movie does: It Ends with Us could have been better, but it also could have been a whole lot worse. 

Family problems, '90s style

How you react to Landline, a comedy set in 1995, depends a lot on how you react to Jenny Slate, a comic actress whose performance encompasses what might be called a level of hysteria you'll either find endearing or annoying. (I leaned toward annoying.) On the verge of marriage, Slate's Dana is one of those characters who hasn't settled into her self. As a result, Dana's not sure whether she's ready to spend a lifetime with her fiancé (Jay Duplass). Dana's father, on the other hand, has been in a long marriage with his sometimes sardonic wife (Edie Falco). An advertising copywriter who aspires to be a playwright, Dad (John Turturro) is having an affair that's discovered when Dana's rebellious younger sister (Abby Quinn) finds a series of love poems Dad has written to his mistress. How rebellious is Quinn's Ali? She smokes cigarettes, has become sexually active and even tries snorting heroin. Meanwhile, Slate's Dana acts out her uncertainty about marriage by having an affair with an old college flame (Finn Wittrock). The supporting performances are sharp and the writing by Lillian Robespierre, who directed, and Elizabeth Holm, can be funny. (Robespierre, by the way, directed Slate in Obvious Child, a 2014 rom-com involving a woman who has an abortion). Landline never creates the feeling that anything momentous hangs in its easy-going balance, but it has been drawn with affection for characters whose struggles, for the most part, feel real -- if not profound. Remember it's the '90s, a time when people still had dot-matrix printers attached to their clunky looking computers. It doesn't have much to do with what the movie's about, but looking at these techno dinosaurs made we wonder whether anyone ever swooned with nostalgia over yesterday's technology. I'm guessing, no.

She's gifted. Is that good?

Chris Evans stars in a story that asks: What's the best way to raise a math genius?

Is it better for a child to be supremely gifted or ultra-normal? Let's define some terms. In the case of the new movie Gifted, a genius child is one who can hang with mathematicians twice or even three times her age, figure out brain-busting equations and become a splendid freak of nature, a prodigy who deserves to be separated from her rude and scoffing peers. Normal? Well, those kids play with other children, don't consider themselves part of brainiac aristocracy and generally fit into their surroundings.

If those sound like extremes, you're right. And that's part of the trouble with Gifted, which concocts many scenes designed to advance one side or the other. Nuance? Not really.

Frank (Captain America's Chris Evans) takes care of his seven-year-old niece Mary (Mckenna Grace). Mary's a math genius, but Frank -- who lives in Florida and who scratches out a meager living repairing boat motors -- doesn't want his niece to become an isolated outsider, a girl segregated from other kids by her astronomical IQ.

Mary lives with Frank because her mother (also a math genius) committed suicide. Before her death, Frank's sister suggested that Frank raise Mary. Mary's late mom grew up under the harsh tutelage of a mother (Lindsay Duncan) who focused on math prizes to the exclusion of nearly everything else.

Against the advice of his neighbor (a wasted Octavia Spencer), Frank sends Mary to public school. Her teacher (Jenny Slate) quickly recognizes Mary's capabilities and suggests -- along with the school's principal -- that Mary enroll in a school for gifted kids. A full scholarship will be arranged, but Frank resists.

To add to the movie's inflated poignancy, Mary has a one-eyed cat for a pet, another of the film's outcasts.

Before the movie ends, Duncan's Evelyn sues her son for custody of Mary. The drama takes us through foster homes, courtroom scenes, separations that are supposed to be heartbreaking, and the near-death of the one-eyed cat.

The movie ignores many potentially rich dramatic pathways, the most notable being its refusal to explore why Frank quit his job as a Boston philosophy professor to become a blue-collar dropout in Florida. If Frank really wanted to become Mary's guardian, he might have kept his job and his health insurance. He would have avoided looking irresponsible and bereft.

But Gifted isn't complex or subtle enough to explore such contradictions: They simply become part of a backstory that's more suggested than probed.

Shorn of his Captain America persona, Evans seems only a little less bland; Duncan does her best to convey the arch elitism if an IQ snob and young Grace proves cute and engaging.

The movie's basic conflicts are interesting enough, but director Marc Webb (The Amazing Spider Man and (500) Days of Summer) doesn't plumb enough depths: Instead, he throws lots of tasty ingredients into his stew and overcooks them until they soften and (alas) turn to mush.

'Obvious Child': a different kind of romcom

Jenny Slate stars in a movie about an aspiring comic who isn't ready for motherhood.

Obvious Child deserves credit for dealing with abortion in an entirely credible way -- presuming you're talking about the abortion of a privileged New York woman who lives in trendy Brooklyn and is trying to make her way into the competitive world of stand-up comedy.

Director Gillian Robespierre makes her debut with a romantic comedy built around an aspiring comedian you'll either find funny or annoying. I leaned toward the latter view, which undoubtedly colored my opinion about this widely praised indie.

Jenny Slate's Donna Stern works at a bookstore that's going out of business and performs her personalized comic routines in a low-grade nightspot.

On stage, Donna talks about herself in ways that mix self-deprecation and hostility. She's one of those comics who giggles at her own jokes, which, as I've said, didn't do much to move the needle on my laugh meter.

And that would have been fine had the movie recognized that Donna may be marking time before she gets on with her "real" life. I'm not sure it does.

Slate (familiar from TV's Bob's Burgers, Parks and Recreation and Kroll Show) doesn't do much to take her character beneath the surface. Donna's a self-absorbed young woman with divorced parents: an artsy-fartsy, puppeteer father (Richard Kind) and a strictly business mom (Polly Draper).

Early on, Donna is dumped by her boyfriend (Paul Briganti). He's put off by the fact that she discusses their relationship on stage, suggesting an under-explored and interesting subject: What happens when someone uses someone else's life as material?

A distraught Donna tries to rebound with a drunken one-night stand. She sleeps with Max (Jake Lacy), a WASPy guy who happens to find her funny and engaging, and who's also consistently nice.

A night that might have fizzled into memory persists when Donna discovers that she's pregnant. She's smart enough to know that she's not ready for motherhood, and never wavers in her desire to have an abortion.

That's not to say that she's callous about it: Donna understands that she's making a big decision, and she eventually has a conversation with her mother about it.

Mom knows what life was like before Roe vs. Wade. It's the opposite with Donna. We're talking about a young woman who has grown up with abortion and accepts it -- although she probably never thought she'd find herself in a position where she needed one.

Meanwhile, Lacy's Max persists in his pursuit of Donna. He doesn't know she's pregnant, and sees a possibility for a deeper relationship.

There's not much supporting cast here. Gaby Hoffmann has a nice turn as Donna's best friend; and Gabe Leiderman plays a gay comic who's also one of Donna's pals.

Obvious Child is bound to connect with lots of young women: For me, the movie would have worked better had Donna been something other than mediocre stand-up comic. Many of her routines are sprinkled, Louie-like throughout the movie, a ploy that, for me, just didn't work.

Obvious Child does, however, lower the volume of talk about abortion, allowing a female character to treat it as a part of life -- not a happy one, but one that is not necessarily ruinous or soul-shattering, either.

That statement deserved a more substantial movie.