Puccini for Beginners

Better than Woody Allen's last five movies combined, PUCCINI FOR BEGINNERS is that snappiest, funniest, romantic comedy in recent memory. The cast is spectacular and the direction is flawless. I can't say enough good things about this movie. I first heard about it at Sundance; everyone I know who attended kept telling how I needed to see it. I am not one to buy the hype so I just let the movie fade from memory. Having just seen it, I see that the hype wasn't unjustified; in fact, I'd say it wasn't strong enough. Put simply: this movie is cute. C. U. T. E. Gretchen is adorable, as always. Elizabeth Reaser is a dream come true; she delivers her dialogue with the skill and precision of a government trained sniper. Justin is so affable, you can hardly stand it. Overall, I just have to say that missing this movie highly, highly inadvisable.

This is one of the most delightful romantic comedies I've seen in a long time and one which should get wide distribution and a crossover audience in major cities as well as out-of-the-way communities. The San Francisco Lesbian & Gay Film Festival audience last night were stamping their feet and whistling along with the bravos as Maggenti attended the premiere...While it has yet to find a distributor, I'm confident, if last night was any indication, that one will be ringing her phone any minute...funny, witty, smart, a New York scene with wonderful actors, Justin Kirk, the adorable Gretchen Mol and beautiful Elizabeth Reasor...wait till you see it...you'll fall in love with all the characters...congrats, Maria, another success (The Incredibly True Story of Two Girls in Love; The Love Letter, Without a Trace (TV)...)

"Puccini for Beginners" is yet another independent relationship comedy. I remember a long line of them coming out probably around the same time this one did. We have love triangles and writers waxing on neurotically about love and relationships.

The lead is a writer, a lesbian who is unable to admit her true feelings, and she goes from a break up to a man. He's a philosophy professor who loves everything about her that it doesn't matter that she's a lesbian. In addition to their differences in sexual orientation, there are other love entanglements that get in their way - "with all the twists and turns of a classic Puccini" as the DVD case says. I would agree with that if the twists and turns in Puccini operas are obvious and uninspired with contrived culminations.

I enjoyed the casting, Elizabeth Reaser has a fresh face and isn't your typical romantic comedy lead. I fell in love with Justin Kirk as Andy Botwin in "Weeds" and I fell in love with him again here. The actresses who play her friends actually look like regular friends. But the cast wasn't able to save the characters. We have a lesbian with the prosaic name of Allegra, a writer whose neurotic, and a philosophy professor who pontificated on her vocabulary and the virtues of love and relationships. And none of them had interesting character traits.

The characters, the love triangles and the imperious dialogue were all flat. And the references to Puccini? Allegra likes going to the opera. So does Philip. I think that sums up all the imaginative aspects of "Puccini for Beginners".

"She voted Republican, you should have known." Only in American movies does voting Right automatically equate to being a Nazi supporter or being a serial-killer. (Good luck to you if you've already been brainwashed by Hollywood flicks into adopting this mind-set.) There are many other examples of liberal indoctrination; it is persistent and all-present in PFB.

Nearly every character behaves like a pre-election politician trying to rake in votes among his liberal electorate, by injecting as many asinine politically-correct statements into the vapid dialogue as they can; so much so in fact that half-way through this painfully unfunny turkey I was musing on whether the film's incompetent writer/director had the primary goal of entertaining people i.e. making them laugh (remember: a comedy, so that's her job), or whether this terribly lame script was merely an excuse for her to voice her painfully predictable and utterly mindless left-wing views. Either way, she is a buffoon with zero talent. After all, isn't this the same Maria who molested us with "The Incredibly Lame Adventure of Two Girls in Love"?

PFB is bizarre pile of rom-com (all rom and no com) horse-manure about an unbearably unattractive/unappealing lesbian who is at the center of a love square, meaning that she has affairs with three people, almost all at once. In the absurd "reality" of this stupid movie, this ugly woman is desired and lusted over by every man and woman she meets – while Mol Gretchen (the ACTUAL beauty here) is the one getting cheated on and dumped by both men and women. Yes, I'd laugh at this cretinous role-reversal – if only it were intentional. It isn't.

Elizabeth Reaser is such a mediocre and uncharismatic actress and – as I will mention at least ten times more – bearing such a horrendous face, that my nepotism radars immediately switched on. I had a quick look at her bio – and sure enough: her stepfather was nothing less than owner of the Detroit Pistons, a post that her mother took over later on. That explains quite a bit, doesn't it? Further proof that in Hollywood you can only make it if you have relatives in the industry, if you belong to a certain ethnic group, or if you have an upper-class background. (And if you fall into all three categories, a movie-career becomes virtually a certainty – should you want one.) This is quite ironic – and highly hypocritical – considering this movie's pro-Socialist pro-working-class message of equality, huh?

Let me get this straight: the movie promotes anti-capitalism while seeking to make as much profit in a very competitive movie market? Furthermore: the movie portrays Republicans as greedy elitists – while the movie's writer/director hires some rich preppie daughter from a powerful and wealthy American family to play a left-wing lesbian? Perhaps one needs to be daft in the extreme in order to "understand" liberal ideology and the self-contradicting means by which they attempt to impose their views on the rest of us who lack this extreme daftness.

But hip social issues aren't Maria's only pointless obsession. The script is also burdened, saddled, and ultimately crushed by Maria's laughable desire to be taken seriously as an intellectual; that much is obvious. Instead of focusing on making the movie FUNNY (something she's clearly incapable of anyway), this fool tries to impress us with pseudo-intellectual piffle, while making boring left-wing insinuations every 5 minutes – as if Manbearpig itself had hired her for the job.

The script fails in every department, however. The characters aren't believable; they are politically-correct cardboard cut-outs, walking indie-film clichés. They aren't even remotely funny; not even slightly amusing, and very rarely interesting. The dialog sounds fake and forced, not much better than what one gets in a typical episode of "Friends".

Credibility is stretched to breaking point as the entire script relies heavily on absurd coincidences – while Maria desperately tries to justify these too-numerous-to-mention chance meetings with some pretentious, unconvincing gobbledygook about why Freud thought there was "no such thing as coincidence". Besides, who gives a rat's bum what Freud thought about anything not related to psychoanalysis? It's like quoting what Plato thought was the best way to cook spaghetti. Or what Agassi thinks about French poetry.

And nice try, attempting to portray New York's left-wing lesbian "elite" as smart and well-educated. New York City is a place of high imbecility, not at all anymore the city in which "if you can make it here you can make it anywhere". Make what? Bad movies?

Allegra (Elizabeth Reaser) gets caught dating both Grace (Gretchen Mol) and Philip (Justin Kirk). The movie flashes back to the time when she's dating Samantha (Julianne Nicholson). She's a Puccini opera loving New York writer. Her ex Nell (Tina Benko) and Vivian (Kate Simses) are advancing in their relationship. Samantha hates opera, questions her lesbianism, and breaks up with Allegra to go back to her former boyfriend Jeff. As Allegra resigns herself to be alone, she meets first Philip and then Grace. She sleeps with Philip. Then she sleeps with Grace without knowing that they're actually in a stale long-term relationship together.

It's a quirky little rom-com. I love all the actors although Reaser may not be up to being a manic comedic lead. She's not quite big enough to fill the character's shoes. There are some light humorous moments that are kinda funny. The laughs are never big enough to rise up to hilarious. There is a little bit of an interesting take on lesbian relationship struggles. The irreverent tone adds up to a cute but strictly small little indie.