Who and what do you believe? How well do you know your family members and friends? How about your lover, wife, husband? Who can you trust, unequivocally? Nagging questions all, but of crucial importance in the maintenance of human relationships at all levels.
The original play and now this film provide a cleverly contrived structure to examine these core issues but it necessarily falls short of providing definitive answers, except for one: how it all started. From that point – like after the first shot is fired in war – all is chaos thereafter and truth is dead and gone.
The opening scene is relatively innocent, yet it contains the nub of things to come when the young woman, Kim (a ravishing Caroleen Feeney) poses a logic problem to her middle-aged lover, Matt (Saul Rubinek) as they drive to their destination. As he gropes for the generally well-known solution about posing the one correct question to two opposing entities - computers, as it happens - it's clear he has no answer...
They're on their way to Matt's former girl friend, Nancy (Bonnie Bedelia) from twenty years ago, to her house and her husband, Wes (David Strathairn), both of whom are academics: Wes at a finishing college for girls - or is he? - Nancy at Harvard and a tenured professor no less. In fact, all four are academics, Matt being a musicologist and Kim with a computer science career at MIT.
Matt is on his way to Harvard to deliver a lecture, one that he thinks will shatter the music world with his monumental discovery about computer generated music – and a revelation only made possible with the assistance of Kim. Nancy and Wes, for their part, just tend to get more entrenched in their cloistered world as they grow older and, incidentally, emotionally apart.
Anyway, Matt thought it would be a good idea to visit his old flame while at Harvard. And why not? Relive old times, exchange pleasantries, the old you-did-I-did routine to see who's been most successful in life – so far.
Well, after pleasant meal at a local diner, things start to deteriorate rapidly when Wes, the next morning, discovers that a $50 bill is missing from his wallet. Mentally retracing the prior evening, Wes and Nancy agree that he didn't pay for the meal with the $50 - Nancy used plastic. And so, Wes says: Well, then, Kim stole it from me!
The real problem, of course, is that Wes resents Matt's presence; Wes also has eyes for Kim, as much as he tries to deny it; and Matt still, obviously, has a soft spot for Nancy. Kim, the real outsider, is a spoiler: verbally, bodily and emotionally as she uses all her feminine skills in attempts to burst the studied poise of those she deems to be posers. To that extent, Kim is perhaps the only honest – to a point – person in this quad-wrangle.
And so, the physical and verbal jousting continues, in various locations in the house and outdoors – and obviously reminiscent of Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf? (1963); although the latter is a superior movie and a better story. Still, Bad Manners manages to provide incisive dialog, delicious irony and a believable story – all too believable, perhaps.
The cast here is uniformly excellent, although none of the characters are likable except for Professor Harper (Julie Harris) who tells Matt, in no uncertain terms, exactly what she thinks of his musical discovery. Saul Rubinek's face says it all; and that scene is the best of the movie, I think.
Interestingly, the epilogue reveals the irony of what really happened to that $50 bill – an item that just doesn't matter in the context of what happened between the feuding four. I understand that the original stage play excluded that information; so, I guess it's possible the film's producers demanded it for the movie as a sop to viewers' curiosity. So many viewers just have to have their closure kick, don't they?
What's more important, though, is what happens to those four after the dust of personal invective drifts away and settles. There are hints of possibilities, but that's always another story...
Give this film eight out of ten. Highly recommended for adults only.
May 30, 2012
The original play and now this film provide a cleverly contrived structure to examine these core issues but it necessarily falls short of providing definitive answers, except for one: how it all started. From that point – like after the first shot is fired in war – all is chaos thereafter and truth is dead and gone.
The opening scene is relatively innocent, yet it contains the nub of things to come when the young woman, Kim (a ravishing Caroleen Feeney) poses a logic problem to her middle-aged lover, Matt (Saul Rubinek) as they drive to their destination. As he gropes for the generally well-known solution about posing the one correct question to two opposing entities - computers, as it happens - it's clear he has no answer...
They're on their way to Matt's former girl friend, Nancy (Bonnie Bedelia) from twenty years ago, to her house and her husband, Wes (David Strathairn), both of whom are academics: Wes at a finishing college for girls - or is he? - Nancy at Harvard and a tenured professor no less. In fact, all four are academics, Matt being a musicologist and Kim with a computer science career at MIT.
Matt is on his way to Harvard to deliver a lecture, one that he thinks will shatter the music world with his monumental discovery about computer generated music – and a revelation only made possible with the assistance of Kim. Nancy and Wes, for their part, just tend to get more entrenched in their cloistered world as they grow older and, incidentally, emotionally apart.
Anyway, Matt thought it would be a good idea to visit his old flame while at Harvard. And why not? Relive old times, exchange pleasantries, the old you-did-I-did routine to see who's been most successful in life – so far.
Well, after pleasant meal at a local diner, things start to deteriorate rapidly when Wes, the next morning, discovers that a $50 bill is missing from his wallet. Mentally retracing the prior evening, Wes and Nancy agree that he didn't pay for the meal with the $50 - Nancy used plastic. And so, Wes says: Well, then, Kim stole it from me!
The real problem, of course, is that Wes resents Matt's presence; Wes also has eyes for Kim, as much as he tries to deny it; and Matt still, obviously, has a soft spot for Nancy. Kim, the real outsider, is a spoiler: verbally, bodily and emotionally as she uses all her feminine skills in attempts to burst the studied poise of those she deems to be posers. To that extent, Kim is perhaps the only honest – to a point – person in this quad-wrangle.
And so, the physical and verbal jousting continues, in various locations in the house and outdoors – and obviously reminiscent of Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf? (1963); although the latter is a superior movie and a better story. Still, Bad Manners manages to provide incisive dialog, delicious irony and a believable story – all too believable, perhaps.
The cast here is uniformly excellent, although none of the characters are likable except for Professor Harper (Julie Harris) who tells Matt, in no uncertain terms, exactly what she thinks of his musical discovery. Saul Rubinek's face says it all; and that scene is the best of the movie, I think.
Interestingly, the epilogue reveals the irony of what really happened to that $50 bill – an item that just doesn't matter in the context of what happened between the feuding four. I understand that the original stage play excluded that information; so, I guess it's possible the film's producers demanded it for the movie as a sop to viewers' curiosity. So many viewers just have to have their closure kick, don't they?
What's more important, though, is what happens to those four after the dust of personal invective drifts away and settles. There are hints of possibilities, but that's always another story...
Give this film eight out of ten. Highly recommended for adults only.
May 30, 2012