Love the Hard Way

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!!

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.

Adrien Brody, will you marry me?

Proposals aside, once again, Brody proves why he deserved his Oscar (and that kiss from Halle Berry). He gives a beautiful, touching performance here as a charming, rakish, snakeskin-jacket-wearing con artist who falls in love with a girl from the right side of the tracks. Jack Grace is no ordinary sleazeball, though. He keeps a secret storage unit seperate from the apartment he shares with his partner-in-crime Charlie (Jon Seda), where he keeps first editions of classic novels (he has a penchant for Melville) and works on his own novel. In other words, he's exactly the kind of bad boy that would attract intellectual Claire (Charlotte Ayanna), a beautiful, unstable biology major at Columbia. Claire tells him she likes movies best that make her cry, and he does his best to oblige her, ultimately sending her on a self-destructive bender that makes him look like a good boy.

Brody carries this film, and the lovely Charlotte Ayanna is unfortunately not given nearly as much to work with. She spends most of her time alternating between trying to change him (we all know how well that works), and having hysterics, and then finally goes on to attempt to prove that she can exist in his world and take the kinds of risks that he gets off on. The romance between the two is not well-developed at the beginning, either, so though we see plenty in him that makes us believe she loves him, we don't see what has gone on between them. Brody, however, makes up the slack in the script with every shot of his wonderfully expressive eyes. He is the walking, talking answer to the question, "Why do good girls like bad boys?"

Unfortunately, this film only had a limited engagement at the Starz Film Center, and as far as I know, does not have any wider distribution. This is a shame, particularly after Brody's Oscar win this year, and I hope that this will change and that more people will get to see this movie and see one of the most talented actors of his generation in action.

I don't understand why this movie has been so reviled by critics and IMDb users. The obsession and descent into darkness of the nice girl Claire, depicted by Charlotte Ayanna without any annoying mannerisms, are so realistic they made me ache. Stories like hers are very common, although not everybody goes to such extremes. Adrien Brody is an excellent actor and gives an interesting performance, but I find him miscast: he doesn't really exude a life of crime out of every pore. The script doesn't actually explain how Jack Grace became the way he is. The sketchy details about his background he provides Claire could be a figment of his overactive imagination. So all we can do is watch Claire sink lower and lower, but eventually redeem herself. And is Jack 'cured' after two year in jail and a close call? Probably not.

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.