Here’s a movie about writers that comes on like it loves words. Writer/director Josh Boone has one of the movie’s heroes – a failed novelist alas – quote at length from Raymond Carver. It’s a beautiful passage from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, which delicately articulates an achingly human mystery. But don’t misunderstand me; this is not some austere art film or dry think piece about intellectual agony made under the sign of Great American Fiction. When we hear the Carver quote near the end of the movie, it’s there to spell out the bleeding obvious, which neatly sums up this film’s boldly emotive style. Boone may be a fan of fiction, but what he really loves is jerking tears. This is a three-hanky job, but take an extra just in case.
we’re deep in telemovie territory
Sweet-natured and packed with incident, tears, last-minute reprieves, tragedy, slapstick comedy, leaden wit and an ever so comforting belief in a harmonious universe, A Place for Me is a harmless family indie melodrama that seems made to evoke nostalgic memories of classy middle-brow TV high-tone soaps like, say, thirtysomething (though there is nothing here as rich as that much-loved show.)
A Place for Me might once have been called a weepie. Boone seems an apt pupil of the form. His script shapes the action around a family and that lets him explore a range of generational experience in the terms of such trusted plot tropes as 'midlife crisis’, 'coming of age’ and 'unrequited romance’.
The action revolves around Bill (Greg Kinnear) and his two teenage children, Sam (Lily Collins) and Rusty (Nat Wolff). A once-gifted novelist, Bill has raised his brood to be writers. As the film opens on Thanksgiving, Sam has announced that her first novel is to be published. This raises the tantalising possibility that Boone maybe making a film about the tension between art and artist, between responsibility to a medium and the messy business of the 'human contract’, a bit like Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry. As it happens, Boone has no such ambitions. Instead, Boone produces one ironic gag: his cast of educated, cultivated, deep-thinking types is just as primitive and inept when it comes to manufacturing a decent relationship as the rest of us mere mortals. Or to put it another way, we’re deep in telemovie territory.
The plot is about the fallout from Bill’s recent divorce to Erica (Jennifer Connolly). With a failed marriage as a role model, Sam and Rusty are romantic road-kill; Sam, at 19, is already jaded. She seeks sex but avoids involvement. The real source of her angst is that she has not forgiven her mother for leaving Bill and turning him into a professional sad sack. Rusty, a virginal 16-year-old, is recessive and romantic to the point of being a complete nincompoop. Bill, meanwhile, pines for Erica. Occasionally he stalks her (which is played for laughs), and when he’s not quoting Carver or Flannery O’Conner, he’s bonking a friendly neighbour and wishing it were his wife.
Since this is a romantic melodrama that respects the form, Boone is obliged to provide redemption for all, and it’s in the movie’s tangled subplots where most of its incidental pleasures lie. Sam’s defenses fall under the sincere affection of Lou (Logan Lerman), a writer from her graduate class who nurses his mother who is on the cusp of succumbing to a cancer that is eating her brain. Rusty falls heavily for Kate (Liana Liberato), a school classmate with self-hate issues, and much to everyone’s surprise, she reciprocates his affection.
What holds the film together isn’t Boone’s sense of style (it’s basically point and shoot), but the performances. Kinnear, always terrific, is very good in an embarrassing part that has him play a dumb intellectual and goof-ball dad. All the juvenile leads are very good, but it’s Connelly who is the standout; her Erica seems to belong to a far more tough-minded picture than this one.
A Place for Me is safe and sweet and conservative. I don’t think it believes in the power of words at all. But Boone is brilliant at pushing those buttons that stir up big emotions. I think he prefers the surging, heaving pleasures of the movie soap opera to the power of literature, which makes this very much a picture for our times.
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