jsmith1480

I saw The Quitter last night on PBS. Matthew & Julianna Bonifacio wore almost all the hats in realizing this 2014 indie (including playing the lead characters, Jonathan and Georgie). Jonathan was a major league baseball player who walked away from his career and from Georgie and their baby girl. When Jonathan and Georgie meet again back in New York 7 years later they try to stitch together some kind of relationship mainly for the sake and the love of their now 8-year old Luka. Like many an actor with Mediterranean in his marrow (Pacino is an obvious example) Matthew acts with his fried-egg eyes and nails you every time with those big, unblinking gapers.

I wish that Matthew, who also wrote the movie, had helped us better understand Jonathan's costly self-doubt. We know it has a lot to with an unforgivably insensitive,angry father but...we need to see more. Nevertheless, Matthew's essential insight about Jonathan and Georgie is bang on: for them what matters is that the modus vivendi they've put together holds: painfully,imperfectly but holding.

Inspite of Dominic Cooper's tour de force, I found myself about an hour in feeling I'd been watching this movie for three hours. This is a static movie. Yes, there is that golden look, the sumptuous locales and the noisy hedonism, but the characters themselves don't evolve. Until almost the end, Latif is as stymied and troubled by his unwanted "good fortune" as he was five minutes in. Uday remains the same exuberant psychotic who can change from bountiful to brutal with the breeze. It is as if we are watching the same action, somewhat varied, over and over again. Nevertheless this film, based on real life, is worth seeing for Dominic Cooper's superlative performance as Latif/Uday.

Bring Clifton Webb forward 60 years, add wackiness, and you have Kevin Kline as the eccentric bachelor in a rent-stabilized dump on the Upper East Side (yes, there are such flats still). His new roomie played by Paul Dano has a poignance, a sad yearning that I haven't seen conveyed so well since Timothy Bottoms in "Last Picture Show." Dano has the sort of face you only see nowadays looking at you across time in family pictures from a century ago or more. The face is ingenuous, pure. The kind of face that America just doesn't make anymore.

Both characters have built protective walls around themselves, perhaps necessarily. Though they fascinate each other, and unintentionally entertain each other, they can't decide whether or not to be real allies.

The older man depends on super-annuated ladies of wealth for his dining out and his winters in Florida. The younger man, though straight, enjoys wearing ladies lingerie while having sex. It can be all a bit depressing.But there's a soft landing, a nice ending to this opus all around.