Une semaine ordinaire

I adore Jason Bateman and when I see he's in something, I watch him. I just love his no-nonsense delivery. He never tries to be funny; he reacts to the situation at hand.

He stars in "The Longest Week" from 2014, and like another reviewer here, I'm wondering why Jenny Slate is top-billed. I didn't know who she was until I looked it up.

Bateman plays 40-year-old Conrad Valmont who lives, as he has always lived, in the Valmont Hotel, owned by his parents. One morning the phone wakes him up, informing him that security will be up shortly to escort him and his dog Napoleon out of the hotel. The reason: his parents are divorcing and aren't paying any of his bills any longer.

He is able to get his chauffeur (Barry Primus) to care for Napoleon, but as far as caring for him, he really doesn't know where to go. He does something he never does - takes the subway. On the train he makes eye contact with a beautiful young woman (Olivia Wilde), who gives him her number. Dylan moves in on his friend and rival, a successful artist, Dylan Tate.

Dylan has recently dropped his girlfriend Jocelyn and has met a fabulous woman he thinks that he's in love with. When he attends Dylan's art show, the subway woman is there, and she's the same woman with whom Dylan is in love. He promises Dylan that he will not make a play for her, but he does, and they fall in love.

Beautifully photographed, this is a pleasant film, somewhat humorous, until it nears the end. I don't now if the filmmaker ran out of money, script, or what, but the film has a constant narration for a good ten minutes as scenes are being shown with no dialogue.

Kind of left me flat, despite all of the good acting.

Tony Roberts plays Conrad's therapist, who gives him a low-cost loan. As his chauffeur, Primus plays a man who knows Conrad better than anyone and has real affection for him.

Billy Crudup, whom I saw on stage in Arcadia and who was so marvelous in Stage Beauty, is wonderful, as a friend resigned to the fact that Conrad is a woman-stealing jerk who has been in the research phase of his great novel for years. House's Olivia Wilde (that's how I know her) looks fantastic and is believable as the object of both Conrad's and Dylan's affections.

This should have been better.

I've waited a long time to see a film like this. A simple story, beautifully shot with an enchanting soundtrack. Like others, I'm now completely turned off by the big budget, green screen, CGI 'blockbusters' that now seem to infest our theatres (cinemas), and was delighted to just sit back and let this quiet little story wash over me.

The neo-retro cinematography turned New York into Paris and the design had the men smart and dapper and the women beautifully Hepburnesque, I loved it all and it was only topped by the husky piano jazz soundtrack.

I won't go into the acting, depth of plot and character, who's films it resembles or whatever subliminal message was supposed to be projected, others have very kindly furnished that information. Suffice to say the leads were all impossibly good looking (of they were, they're actors) but not as good as their surroundings, New York has never looked so enticing.

So, this film won't win any awards for supreme cleverness or anything but if you're after something to romance your eyes and ears then you'll find its 80 minutes time well spent.

To call "The Longest Week" a delight would be an overstatement. To call it average would be unjust. The movie is a Wodehousian romance which features terrific visuals in almost every frame. That's right... Almost every frame is picture perfect like this is a Wes Anderson film. At the same time, the dialogues and the story are entirely "Allenesque". If you liked Fading Gigolo - an attempt to recreate Allenesque filmmaking - you will fall in love with The Longest Week.

Why is Jenny Slate top-billed when the story is clearly about Jason Bateman's philandering character? And why is Jenny Slate even in the movie? You could replace her character with anyone else, and you'd hardly notice any difference. I saw this at a preview screening. I hope the filmmakers realize it and change the billings.

The Longest Week has great visuals, good dialogue and soothing sounds (the soundtrack's totally piano and jazz). The film is also 80 minutes long, and yes, I for one was wanting more as the film was in some ways enchanting.

If you like Wes Anderson films, give it a shot for its beauty! Not a Wes Anderson fan? C'mon! Olivia Wilde is in the movie and she's drop dead gorgeous!

There's nothing wrong, per se, with focusing one's camera and script firmly on the woes and heartaches of the filthy-rich. Indeed, some of the world's most revered film-makers have done so with remarkable success - Woody Allen and Wes Anderson have crafted charming, quirky and emotional films revolving firmly around characters with far too much money and not enough good sense. But creating empathy for hyper-privileged characters is a delicate affair, one that writer-director Peter Glanz - making the move from commercials to movies - more or less fluffs up in The Longest Week. The final film, evidently influenced by Allen, Anderson and copious amounts of offbeat French cinema, struggles to free itself from the quirky artifice that should disguise - and not constitute - the depth of his story and characters.

Conrad Valmont (Jason Bateman) lives a life of leisure and laziness within the comfortable surroundings of a Manhattan hotel belonging to his parents. As a job, he professes to be writing, although he is unlikely to ever complete, his great American novel. His splendid life is rudely disrupted when his parents decide to divorce - and neither father nor mother is willing to keep paying for Conrad's profligate lifestyle. Suddenly, he finds himself out on the street: a situation he temporarily addresses by moving into the swanky apartment belonging to his best friend, Dylan (Billy Crudup). Conrad also winds up making a move on Beatrice (Olivia Wilde), the smart, kooky model who has enjoyed a courtly, mutual flirtation with Dylan for quite some time.

Plot-wise, that's pretty much it. Newly-poor boy meets pretty girl, boy pretends to still be rich, girl falls for it, boy exploits friends (from Dylan to his long-serving, long-suffering butler) to continue his ruse, repeat ad nauseum. It's a narrative that requires considerable skill and sensitivity to pull off, because it could so easily come off as a vapid film glorifying the silly, fickle whims of the rich and fancy. There's no doubt some satire at work here (the title gives a hint as to the length of Conrad's suffering), but it's so blunt that it winds up getting lost in the rest of the film's excesses. In fact, Glanz frequently trades it in for a lot of indie/art-house accoutrements: take, for instance, the way in which it's impossible to quite set a date or time to the film's romanticised version of Manhattan, the almost deliberately French scene in which Conrad and Beatrice dance in a bar in New York, or the Andersonian title cards introducing different segments of the film.

The odd thing is how Glanz both benefits from and wastes his very good cast. On paper, Bateman is perfect for the part of Conrad: he's played a disinherited heir before on TV's Arrested Development, and has bucketloads of personal charm as an actor that could help make Conrad more palatable to audiences. To some extent, that's what Bateman does in practice. The writing keeps him from making Conrad truly sympathetic, but he gets the audience to care a little more when his character meanders into some truly dark places. Even so, it's hard to shake the feeling that - under Glanz's direction - Bateman is miscast. Wilde is charming as the Austen-obsessed Beatrice, but her character really represents little more than a reward for the two men of the story. Crudup, meanwhile, is at his most personable in the film, but Dylan, too, is more an afterthought than a fully-fledged character - both to Conrad and his own creator.

To be perfectly fair, The Longest Week never promises anything like depth. In fact, Glanz makes several pointed comments within the film about Conrad's immutably shallow nature. But, if a film really wants us to accept that its entire plot will do so little to affect its main character (and Conrad does change, albeit in very small ways), the journey has to be worth it. That's where the film falls short. It spends too much time enamoured of its own design and concept. In effect, Glanz transports his characters into a meticulously-crafted, quaintly ageless version of New York, but fails to really make them come to life in a meaningful way.

Don't get me wrong. This isn't a terrible movie. It's beautifully filmed and well acted, but it's just ultimately unsatisfying. I didn't mind passing an evening watching on Amazon Prime, but I wouldn't have been happy if I'd spent money for it in a theater.

The movie starts out with Bateman, as Conrad, laying out his privileged upper class problems to his therapist - played by Tony Roberts! And if that wasn't enough, the soundtrack launches into some New Orleans Jazz to remove any doubt who they're playing homage to here.

Of course, Jason Bateman's handsome and well spoken character would certainly be the *villain* in any Manhattan-era Woody Allen films, but that's just one of this movie's many problems.

Stylistically, the movie is unabashedly influenced by Wes Anderson. Roberts becomes the narrator, and the movie is divided into storybook style chapters, with occasional amusing cutaways.

On the other hand, the plot is lifted from another movie; namely, "A New Leaf" (1971), written and directed by Elaine May, and starring Walter Mathau. Mathau plays a spoiled rich playboy who has burned through his entire inheritance, and now must find a way to.get through life broke, which is basically the same plot as this movie. May's version is a classic. This, not so much.

Both Allen and Anderson have a real genius for portraying deeply flawed characters in a sympathetic way, and that's where this movie falls short. Jason Bateman is inherently likable, but at some point, you realize you're giving him credit for other characters he's played. As Conrad, he's shallow, self-centered, whiny, and just basically annoying.

Without giving away any spoilers, if you're expecting any great self-realization or epiphany, you'll be disappointed. The movie just meanders its way to one of the absolute laziest endings I've ever scene. Indeed, a critical plot point comes and goes so quickly that I initially missed it, and had to go back because I was totally confused.