Love After Love

As many reviewers have noted , this movie jumps from one time sequence to another and leaves it up to the viewer to basically figure it out. I'm not a big fan of this style of first time director Russell Harbaugh, and with the film's many flawed and unlikable characters, I'm surprised I'm not giving this a 1 or a 2 rating as well.

However, I did find some strong acting here led by the seemingly ageless Andie MacDowell, and some dramatic tension among this dysfunctional family which I found interesting enough to stay with the movie, although part of me wanted to indeed bail.

Overall, a mixed bag for me here, but I can see how many will be turned off by some of the unlikable characters and their crappy actions.

Love After Love should continue the prepositional phrase forever because the major players in this finely wrought drama are forever looking for love or grieving about it. Matriarch Suzanne (Andie MacDowell) loses her husband and wanders around her two sons almost in a fog of grief but maybe more in puzzlement about how they are working out their fates without her influence.

They are flawed adults, like womanizing son, Nicholas (Chris O'Dowd), who has a conflicted intimacy with his mother but more with himself as he wanders among showing the greatest puppy eyes in cinema. He is an emblem of the players who never seem at peace with their current or future partners.

This episodic, fragmented story, whose jumping back and forth in time is occasionally disorienting, in its unsympathetic way, reveals the puzzle-like lives of sentient beings who witness death, go through its mourning rituals, and search for love, carnal and otherwise, in, it would seem, a hedge against oblivion.

Co-writer/director Russell Harbaugh, in a promising debut, navigates smoothly in rough affective waters, saving the best scenes by interspersing them among some fairly quotidian events that play naturally to the death motif. When alcoholic son, Chris (James Adomian), does a standup about the difficulty of Jesus competing with his Father, the metaphor is not lost but not heavy-handed either. Both sons are struggling to compete with dad and themselves.

Love After Love is a satisfying drama about all of us in families we know have dysfunctional working parts but who are on the greatest quest of all for love after love, after love, after love, forever.

This is not a bad movie. It is an atrocious movie! A complete and utter waste of time, celluloid and popcorn. If only there was a way to regain the time spent watching this worthless drivel. Any fool who believes there is any merit to this movie is severely deluded and quite possibly entirely demented.

I saw that Metacritic gave it a much higher score and I really like Chris O'Dowd, but I found this film pretentious and embarrassingly disconnected from reality. Drippingly self-indulgent. My wife and I gave it up after 20 minutes. I would not want to know these characters.

Slightly esoteric and lovely essay on how family members process grief and move on from it -- or not. I've read some of the personal reviews and I wonder how viewers had such a hard time understanding what was going on and puting it all together. This movie is NOT James Joyce or William Faulkner stream of consciousness. The time changes follow the narrative and inform the viewer about how a character got where they are or shows where they may be headed. This film examines how grief affects different members of this family and how it can exacerbate their own flaws and failed relationships. Andie MacDowell really shines here. I thought it was a lovely film and a great debut by the director.