Recensioni di Metacritic

Even though Anders and the people around him can be sorted into recognizable types (a fault, mostly of Mr. Thompson’s book), they are also amusing and awful in ways that can feel disconcertingly real.

The Land of Steady Habits, though not as funny and breezy as Enough Said or Friends With Money or Please Give, is a natural extension of Holofcener’s work, the totality of which is, in part, a rebuke of the idea that likability is necessary or even desirable in film characters.

Despite a few very funny beats, and a charming performance from the great Ben Mendelsohn, there’s an air of tragedy throughout “Steady Habits,” as if everyone is one bottle of wine away from doing or saying something they will regret forever. In other words, it’s an insightful portrait of middle-age in the ‘10s.

Nicole Holofcener's The Land of Steady Habits often suggests the film that American Beauty might have been if the latter had been pruned of its smug hysteria.

As the tone wobbles between absurdity and tragedy, it also starts to shift toward something deeper and more bittersweet than mere midlife ennui. A lot of that is down to Mendelsohn, an actor who seems born to embody Holofocener’s kind of hero: weary and wounded but still putting it out there, a beautiful mess in progress.

The familiar suburban terrain is enriched by Holofcener's knack for turning offhand moments into piercing ones and, especially, by a magnificently off-center Ben Mendelsohn.

We all make mistakes, and we all have the ability to wound when we’re just trying to be clever: Holofcener makes allowances for all of that. But she always favors warmth over sarcasm. And as if she could read our minds, she puts in her characters’ mouths words that we ourselves have sometimes failed to find the guts to say.

In the well-trod territory of fiction about rich men in self-induced emotional crises, the film stands as a worthy, if not exactly groundbreaking, addition.

No matter how much you want to like the film, something is missing: a spark, a shimmer, a thrust of discovery.

Not only is it the only movie she hasn’t written from scratch, and the only movie she hasn’t centered on a woman, it’s also the only movie Holofcener hasn’t been able to make into something more than the sum of its parts.