This film has Oscar buzz all around it. It's a beautifully crafted, brightly written string of pearls. Its lead players, Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church, are both actors we remember seeing from time to time for at least the past fifteen years but whose names never before appeared on our radar screens. Here they both enter the arena of notable film actors and memorably so. The film is a comedy drama to a great extent (at least in my own mind) influenced in style by my late friend, John Cassavetes. Finely directed by Alexander Payne, its comedy issues from the breast of characterization and not contrived, pasted on sit-com lines. This alone is rare in film and denotes craft writing of the preeminent kind.
The icing on this cake is its constancy and within that its splendid subtlety. The story is simple; two friends get together for a last weekend of wine tasting in some of Southern California's wineries just before the marriage of one of them. As it unfolds we see that the story clearly issues from the breast of the two characters, a hapless English teacher still suffering over his divorce of two years past. He has written an honest novel instead of a commercial one so we know that it will not be published some time before the reveal. The other, his pal since college some twenty years before is a fringe actor about to be married but struggling to retain his youth through womanizing. This Lothario is no less pathetic than his writer friend. The film is beautifully cast with the extraordinary Virginia Madsen as the writer's acquaintance with potential to be more.
Highly recommended; be prepared to laugh for just over two hours with very little let up while at the same time being conveyed to the essence of our humanity.
The icing on this cake is its constancy and within that its splendid subtlety. The story is simple; two friends get together for a last weekend of wine tasting in some of Southern California's wineries just before the marriage of one of them. As it unfolds we see that the story clearly issues from the breast of the two characters, a hapless English teacher still suffering over his divorce of two years past. He has written an honest novel instead of a commercial one so we know that it will not be published some time before the reveal. The other, his pal since college some twenty years before is a fringe actor about to be married but struggling to retain his youth through womanizing. This Lothario is no less pathetic than his writer friend. The film is beautifully cast with the extraordinary Virginia Madsen as the writer's acquaintance with potential to be more.
Highly recommended; be prepared to laugh for just over two hours with very little let up while at the same time being conveyed to the essence of our humanity.