Movie reviews: A Late Quartet
You wait ages for a movie about a mid-life crisis to come along, and then four crises arrive together. A Late Quartet (15A), documents the decline and fall of the Fugue String Quartet, as cellist Peter (Christopher Walken) discovers he has incipient Parkinson’s Disease, married couple Juliette (Catherine Keener) and Robert (Philip Seymour Hoffman) fall out of love, and first violin Daniel (Mark Ivanir) embarks on an ill-judged affair. Directed and co-written by Yaron Zilberman, the film is an engrossing tale of characters who are brilliant musicians when following their sheet music, but tend to stumble and stutter when they step off the stage. Walken is superb as the increasingly infirm Peter, suppressing his propensity for grotesque exaggeration in order to more fully explore his character’s quiet rage. Sound-tracked by Beethoven’s string quartet Op 131 — the piece the dying Schubert requested as the last music he would ever hear — the film is itself a quartet, each character contributing an equal share to the poignant theme of the fragility of the ego when juxtaposed with great art. Keener and Seymour Hoffman are contrasted as a couple belatedly discovering that their marriage is built on misdirected passion, she delicate and refined, he a shambling bear with a surprisingly gentle touch, although the interweaving of their crumbling trust and the way in which Peter is betrayed by his failing fingers is undermined by a ham-fisted subplot involving Ivanir’s dalliance with an unsuitable young woman.
A paean to hope, faith, and perseverance, The Odd Life of Timothy Green (G) opens with Cindy (Jennifer Garner) and Jim Green (Joel Edgerton) being told by the doctors that their bid to have a child has failed. Heartbroken, they bury their best wishes for their baby in a box in the backyard; that night, a full-grown flesh-and-blood boy, who calls himself Timothy (CJ Adams), walks out of the backyard and into their lives. Is Timothy real? Based on a story by Ahmet Zappa and directed by Peter Hedges, the film is on one level a story about how a magical boy teaches his parents how to learn from their own parents’ mistakes and so become ideal candidates to adopt a child of their own. That aspect is delightfully achieved, with Garner and Edgerton dovetailing well as a couple, entirely plausible in their desperation to have a baby and very likeable in the pragmatic way they adapt to the inexplicable event that has occurred. Adams turns in a strong performance in what is a difficult role, given that Timothy is a whimsical character with some very strange personality traits. The ‘message’ of the movie, however, that of the need to be environmentally aware, is rather clumsily delivered, especially when Timothy is required to transcend his role as miracle child to become an emblem of hope for new generation.
