Siblings struggle with life crises

 
   

       The Millers aren't a happy lot.

       One of the Miller sisters (Julianna Marguiles) writes novels that sell but she's frustrated by her husband's inertia. A once-successful author (Campbell Scott), he's currently unable to write. 

   Another Miller sister (Gretchen Mol) abandoned her career as a rising rock guitarist to raise her children and support the career of her rock musician husband (Patrick Wilson), a guitarist who spends most of his time on tour and who drinks too much.

    Andy Miller (Edward Burns), the third Miller sibling, recently was dumped by his wife (Morena Baccarin). An artist by trade, Andy is trying to find his footing in a relationship with a friend (Minnie Driver) of his soon to be ex-wife.

   Written and directed by Burns and featuring a strong ensemble cast, Millers in Marriage piles a lot on its plate, so much so that it often seems as if it's working through a checklist of 50something problems.

  Although he includes flashbacks to various pivotal points in the characters' lives, Burns doesn't do much to make the family background of three siblings part of the story. And putting each character at a major turning point feels a little too pat.

    Each sister looks beyond her marriage. 

Marguiles's Maggie has her eye on a local handyman (Brian D'Arcy James). Mol's Eve is tempted by a charming rock journalist (Benjamin Bratt).

    Despite a reasonable amount of conflict, the movie seldom catches fire, and its settings lean toward comforting affluence. Nothing wrong with that but it's almost as if Millers in Marriage is afraid to muss its hair. Too bad. More mess might have been what the movie needed. 

      

 

Bob's Cinema Diary: 1/10/20 -- Three Christs and Song of Names

Three Christs

Three Christs focuses on a psychiatrist who in the 1950s studied three paranoid schizophrenics, each of whom believed that he was Jesus. Although Three Christs derives from a true story, the movie winds up feeling contrived and unconvincing. A miscast Richard Gere portrays Dr. Alan Stone, a psychiatrist who in the picture's early going arrives at a Michigan state hospital to conduct his study. Peter Dinklage, Walton Goggins and Bradley Whitford portray Dr. Stone’s patients, men who have convinced themselves that they are the true Christ. Stone isolates the trio of faux Christs from other patients to determine if they can get along with one another. Stone wonders: If one Jesus is confronted with another, would one of them have to admit that he's deluded. Everyone, of course, knows that the New Testament tells the story of a single Jesus. Director Jon Avnet needed a villain. The closest he comes is Dr. Orbis (Kevin Pollack), the psychiatrist who heads the hospital and who seems to value procedural correctness over sensitive treatment. Charlotte Hope plays Becky, the young woman who becomes Dr. Stone’s research assistant. Julianna Margulies appears as Stone’s wife, a character who adds little to the story. Of the three Christs, Dinklage gives the most interesting performance. Eloquent and nearly regal in bearing, his Canadian-born Joseph Cassel thinks that he should be sent to England. Tragedy looms as Avnet presents Stone as a man who sides with his patients in a way that the hospital establishment mostly mistrusts. He's adamant in his opposition to electroshock therapy, for example. Beneath all the drama, we find a romanticized notion about how the patients help to cure the doctor of his heretofore unacknowledged delusions. The point seems forced, a notion more accepted than discovered by a movie that flirts with intriguing issues but feels like it might have benefited from the intensifying claustrophobia of the stage.

The Song of Names

Based on a novel by classical music critic Norman Lebrecht, The Song of Names aims for high seriousness but fades from the screen without making the expected impact. The story centers on a gifted Jewish violinist who's played at various ages by Luke Doyle, Jonah Hauer-King and Clive Owen. Sent to England from Poland to escape the Nazis, young Dovidl is raised by an English family that goes to great lengths to respect his Jewish heritage. After a rocky start, the supremely confident Dovidl makes friends with Martin, the son of the man who agrees to shelter Dovidl while nurturing the youngster's musical talents. As the two age, Martin develops a belief in Dovidl and promotes his career. On the eve an important concert, the now-grown Dovidl vanishes. After 35 years, Martin (played as an adult by Tim Roth) tries to find his former friend. Director Francois Girard uses Dovidl's disappearance as a source of mystery while the movie shifts between the war and post-war years and the 1980s. Little catches fire with Dovidl's story becoming secondary to Martin's search. The result: A movie that tries to deal with the Holocaust, musical genius and personal transformation fails to plumb any of those areas with sufficient depth. The historical backdrop and the music provide a bit of elevation, but the movie strikes only a minor chord.

Major actors, minor movie

No movie starring Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin can be all bad -- and Stand Up Guys isn't.

Putting Christopher Walken, Al Pacino and Alan Arkin into the same movie raises a large amount of justifiable expectation. None of these veterans have worked together before, and it's reasonable to assume that the cumulative weight of their old-pro experience will deliver the big-screen goods.

Unfortunately, Stand Up Guys -- the story of aging mobsters forced to come to grips with their mortality -- only partially lives up to the promise suggested by its powerhouse cast.

As directed by Fisher Stevens, from a script by Noah Haidle, Stand Up Guys finds its best moments in the relationship between Pacino and Walken, as a couple of bottom-feeding hoods who inhabit the lower echelons of the criminal subculture.

Walken's Doc, who spends most of his time painting pictures of sunrises, refers to himself as a "retired" man. He lives in a modest apartment. His hell-raising days appear to be done. He's proud of the fact that he has cable. Hey, at a certain point, you take your pleasures where you find them.

A low-key drama begins when Pacino's Val (short for Valentine) is released from a 28-year stretch in prison. Val's the movie's most "stand-up" guy because he served his time without ratting out any of his cronies.

Walken's Doc meets Val upon his release. The two hug awkwardly, and the movie proceeds to chart the next 24 or so hours in the lives of these aging felons.

Looking to party after his long prison stint, Val visits a local brothel, only to discover that he's unable to function sexually. Doc proposes a Viagra solution -- which leads the two to break into a pharmacy.

Val has his "party," but even that has its downside. Having consumed too much Viagra, Val winds up at a hospital, where we meet a nurse (Julianna Margulies), who happens to be the daughter of another of their old partners in crime, a getaway driver named Hirsch.(Yes, the script definitely could have done without another joke about a guy whose erection lasts more than four hours.)

Hirsch, we learn, is languishing in a nursing home where he's suffering from emphysema.

To add some proverbial insult to the injury of age-related decline, a vicious mob boss known as Claphands (Mark Margolis)wants Val assassinated. The screenplay eventually gets around to telling us why Val has become a target, while making room for Val and Doc to rescue Arkin's Hirsch from the nursing home where he's pretty much relegated to sitting in his room.

Arkin's Hirsch gets an opportunity to ply his trade as the trio races from the cops and lands in a variety of other jams, not the least of which involves a naked woman (Vanessa Ferlito) they discover in the trunk of the car they've stolen. They become the woman's self-appointed protectors.

They also visit Doc's favorite restaurant where they're waited on by Doc's favorite waitress (Addison Timlin).

I wouldn't say that either Walken or Pacino is in peak form, but they work work well enough together -- with Walken playing the more restrained of the former hoodlums. Walken and Pacino keep the movie watchable, even though the story -- punctuated with well-selected '70s R&B -- doesn't generate much tension.

If you're inclined to think about what might have been accomplished with this kind of cast, Stand Up Guys may prove disappointing. If you're willing to settle for watching Pacino and Walken enact a bromance for seniors, you may be entertained enough to stave off regret. I was.