Love the Hard Way

I'll believe that someone can get bit by a special poisonous spider and gain super powers before I'll believe that someone that looks like Charlotte Ayanna (and supposedly is a science student) would have ANYTHING to do with someone who looks and acts like Brody's character or would start to turn tricks for less than $10,000 per night. The acting is OK, and it is shot well, but the premise is a bit far-fetched. Brody isn't physically imposing enough to carry the role, and Ayanna is FAR too good looking. She would be at Columbia a month before she hooked up with the NYC jet set and, as for him...I mean...who does he intimidate acting like a thug? He's about 140 pounds soaking wet holding a brick...looks convincing as a starving war refugee, not as a tough-guy. Would have been better if Seda and Brody had switched roles. Pam Grier seems to just be going through the motions. The story is interesting, aside from the miscasting, but thoroughly unbelievable. Rent Mean Streets or Pope of Greenwich Village if you want a slice of the New York underworld that's a bit more palatable and easier to stomach.

Absorbing enough drama of doomed love that fails to provides its two protagonists with any kind of emotional consistency, and too often leaves us wondering just why they do the things they do. Brody plays a small-time hustler who's secretly writing a novel in a storage container while Ayanna is the straight-A biology student who falls under his improbable spell. A better writer might have had us believing, but not writer/director Peter Sehr.

It's fun to watch the now famous Adrien Brody interact with the warm and pretty Charlotte Ayanna, the great Jon Seda of Homicide, and that Tarantino-revived 70's icon Pam Grier. Love the Hard Way has a more than decent cast that works well together: Brody has good chemistry with both Ayanna and Seda, and the New York of the movie has good chemistry too: it's real and beautiful without being obtrusive. The German director and the French cinematographer may be why the town has such a fresh look in this movie.

The clothes, however, are obtrusively bad -- it's lucky Brody has a model's body and Seda is hunky, or those duds would make us laugh them off the screen.

The German director's adaptation of a Chinese novel translated to New York may be a bit secondhand. Nonetheless it's not uninteresting to have a pimp/extortionist who's also a budding writer: the film and the actor are intelligent enough to make us entertain the possibility of the two people in one body.

But despite various points of interest, none of it quite works.

I wasn't convinced that any of this stuff was real--the emotional collapse of the petty criminal, the descent into prostitution of the brilliant med student, or their miraculous coming together two years later after prison and a botched suicide.

The trouble with the attempt to establish a hard-edged milieu is that what Brody and Seda's characters are doing doesn't seem ugly enough: the bedroom scams are too pat, and too independent of the outside big city world of crime. The big bachelor pad isn't mean and sleazy enough either; nothing is: I can't quite believe in Brody as a bad guy. The early scenes where Brody and Ayanna are wooing each other start him off not looking hard at all; in fact he just seems like a nice cocky young Jewish boy who's full of himself and bursting with joie de vivre. He could easily be a college student just playing tough and low-life to seem sexy to a studious, well brought up girl. His pimp clothes and pimp manner don't fit him right and just seem put on to strike a pose.

You keep watching your DVD for the acting job Brody, Ayalla and Seda do. As in 21 Grams, they manage to produce many powerful emotional moments even if it doesn't all meld together into a story. The incoherence is signaled by the confused ending. This is a bit more than merely an obscure footnote to The Pianist, but only just.

Wow I cannot believe there is only one other comment for this movie. I have to agree about this movie staying with you. For almost two hours I was completely involved with two people I will never really know, yet for some reason it has changed me in some strange way. I watched the movie and like the others in the theater had the same rollercoster ride of feelings, but it was not until after I left the theater that I had an abundance of emotions come over me. The acting was amazing all the way around, story was an A+. I work hard for the money I make and for the high price I paid for admission, it was all worth it for this great creative process! I suggest that everyone support their local small theater when this film comes around to your town!!

This movie is not a high dollar production. It doesn't need to be. This movie is emotional, intellectual, heart-wrenching and sadly beautiful. I experienced a similar overall feeling from watching "Gia" - a movie about supermodels and the pitfalls of modeling (That happens to be Angelina Jolie's best film - unlike her others, and worth watching.) What Love the Hard Way has, that other films don't, are characters who you really connect with. Not because you share things in common with them, but because they are multi-faceted beings with enough background story to deeply invest the viewer in their fate.

This review/comment isn't going like I had planned. I think the IMDb rating of this film is far too low, and I think those people who gave it a low score were either not paying attention, or not allowing themselves to do so.

Which isn't surprising, because this film is hard to watch at times. Not because it's dull or poorly constructed, but because you don't want to feel the pain.

Watch it. The Ying and Yang are in full blossom here.