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plot synopsis: Reese Holdin (Deschanel) is a miserable young woman living in New York City, scraping by as a bartender and struggling actress and numbing her sorrows with whiskey, drugs, and sex with male co-stars. Her estranged parents are both famous authors, and her mother has recently committed suicide. She receives an offer of $100,000 from a publisher for the rights to the letters her parents wrote to each other, which were willed to Reese by her mother. Reese travels back home to Michigan to claim the letters and reunite with her reclusive father. She finds him cohabiting with a newly-adopted pseudo-family consisting of his former student Shelly (Amelia Warner) and erstwhile Christian rocker Corbit (Ferrell, reunited with his Elf co-star), who assist Don through his grief-stricken, increasingly eccentric and dissipated life. Everyone confronts their respective pains and fears and eventually they all put the "functional" back in "dysfunctional."
review (warning: possible spoilers ahoy...): Writer/director Rapp, accomplished in theatre, comes up with a mixed scorecard on his first film venture. He's assembled a fantastic cast, particularly Deschanel and Harris, who both hit home runs, and he's given them all complex and interesting characters to inhabit. The photography is beautiful and the production design is pitch-perfect, from Reese's sad East Village apartment to Don's run-down house with books stacked floor to ceiling. (I have to take slight issue with the music supervision, though: it's nice to hear bands like Cat Power and The Shins in a movie, but what Midwestern small-town dive bar is realistically going to be playing My Morning Jacket on the jukebox?) What the film disappointingly lacks is subtlety: Rapp pounds his story home, wielding symbolism like a hammer: piano, wham! typewriter, wham! roadkill deer, wham! necktie, wham! dresser drawer, literally wham! And, "Holdin"? Caulfield? Salinger? Reclusive eccentric author? Get it? (Plus, an actress named after a Salinger character playing an actress named after a Salinger character? Whoa, dude, meta!) It's a film that dares to ask you to stay with the protagonist after a scene early in the film where she carries out a misguided mercy killing by putting her leukemia-stricken kitten in a duffel bag and dropping the bag in the East River. (The bag can be seen floating, though, so hope remains for the fictitious kitty.) Depicting mistreatment of animals is a pretty extreme way to make a character point (and something we frown on pretty strongly). Okay, we get it: this is Reese hitting bottom hard; later in the film Don, predictably, hits bottom even harder, though without taking anyone else with him.
Rapp tries to keep the film from being too dire by interjecting moments of levity, mostly through Ferrell's character, but these attempts create awkward oil-and-water tonal shifts. I like Will Ferrell, and I think his portrayal of Corbit is believable, so Will Ferrell the actor is not part of the problem. What is a problem is Will Ferrell the famous star, because the expectation of "wacky Will Ferrell" sent our screening audience into a tizzy over every quirk of his performance, which is actually pretty subtle. And everything leads to a feel-good conclusion that feels unrealistic and unearned. You don't just get over that many years of dysfunction that quickly. The only real surprise in the film is that things turn out so predictably; all the metaphorical Chekhovian guns that are waved around in the first act are fired in the third act. For all the good points to this film—and don't get me wrong, it does have enough of them to make it worth checking out—I left the theater feeling both bludgeoned and pandered to. (mike.03.06)
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