The Time Being

Beautiful photography, beautiful paintings, beautiful filming! But I am afraid if someone doesn't have an intuitive sense or educated background in seeing and comprehending coloration, a sense of space, composition, contrast, texture, and just plain contemplation of beauty; then I do not feel they will appreciate this film.

From start to finish every frame, scene, setting, motion, etc. of this film is art - fine art. The plot line is secondary to the imagery! Frank Langella as Warner Dax, and Wes Bentley as Daniel are both suffering and failing. Warner Dax suffers the alienation of his family and his declining health. Daniel suffers the inability to provide for his family because his art is failing to sell and his marriage is dissolving. They each escape this suffering through their creative abilities in their own way. Warner hires Daniel to assist him in creating his final painting, but Daniel does not realize this. And Daniel, through his association with Warner finds his way back into his art. The story is easy to follow. What's difficult is seeing how the paintings are an outer expression of their internal selves!

The end credits in the movie states original paintings created by Eric Zener and Stephen Wright. I would love to see an exhibition of the paintings created for this film. And I would love to see an exhibit of just some motion picture stills! The two actors are just shadows behind the art.

I'm giving it an 8 because it's beautiful to watch & see. The acting is a bit dry and you just don't care about them.

The only good performance in this movie is Frank Langella. And there are much better films of his to watch. This one reminded me of a student film shot by a film student with little to no talent. The script is mediocre at best. The performances are wooden. There's nothing special about the cinematography. All in all just a big time waster. Its the kind of independent film TV actors make when the show they're making a living off of is on hiatus and they don't want to sit around doing nothing. There is honestly nothing to this film. Its 85 minutes of actors going through the motions. And the actor who played the artist is probably one of the most uninspriring actors of all time. Maybe if we were still in the silent film era a good director could get a good performance out of him just focusing on his eyes. But once he opens his mouth and starts talking. Ugh.

The Time Being is a meditation and a gentle character study. The director manages to capture a mood without too much dialogue. Frank Langella is as usual masterful in the role of a dying man who commissions a down-on-his-luck painter (Wes Bentley), sending him on strange assignments filming sunrises, sunsets and children playing in a playground. The mystery eventually reveals itself leading the painter to seek balance between his family life and his art. The visuals and production design are stunning as are the transitions of swirling paint in water. I saw this film at the Toronto Film Festival and the audience response was very positive. This is an art-house film that won't disappoint.

Another masterful performance by stage and screen veteran Frank Langella, anchors this visually sumptuous but remote depiction of the relationship that begins when a selfish dying man hires a young struggling artist (Wes Bentley) for a series of enigmatic video assignments. A dull actor with intense eyes, Bentley brings very little energy to his role as a neglectful father and husband consumed by his love for the canvas. As a result, the drama remains tentative until the emotional heart of the film, a character played by Sarah Paulson,arrives towards the finale. The culminating set piece, involving Langella's final gift to his family is devastating in its emotional power and visual simplicity, but over all the film feels more of a cinematic exercise than a satisfying dramatic story.

Frank Langella would very, very much be the reason to see this film, he doesn't disappoint...its the film around him that disappoints. Playing his somewhat usual unusual role of enigmatic rich man asking mysterious favors of a somewhat struggling younger person while hiding his own questionable agenda (see also "The Ninth Gate" and "The Box" among others.) Langella shows up on screen maybe ten minutes in snapping at his maid to go the pharmacy after she literally just said she was going there--- He then follows up with the memorable one liner "Life's a lot less complicated ever since I stopped hearing women talk" Its the kind of irresistible barbed one liner that i love hearing come out of Langella in movies exactly like these, and as he went about describing just exactly what he wanted from the young painter whose time and energy he solicits, I was more then wrapped up in the whole mysterious vibe of the film and quite optimistic.

Unfortunately the film as a whole seems a lot more interested in the process of painting and saddling Langella with somewhat ominous monologues with grave overtones about the importance of living while doing what you love while you can. I mean the writer/director gives Langella a good reason for doing that but its possible it could've been done in a somewhat less ham fisted way. While the creation of the various canvases that lead Wes Bentley gets to somewhat lovingly paint are tied in nicely with the main plot line, and the repeated close-ups of paint mixing with water are a neat visual motif (i suppose) its definitely not what i went to this movie to see, but its possible that I went to see this because I just wanted to see what nutty thing the Frank Langella character wanted from the younger character this time around.

What Langella wants is fairly easy to guess and one nice thing on the director's part is that he that he lets Wes Bentley understand almost immediately from the second he sees Sarah Paulson exactly what Langella wanted. The climactic scene of Bentley and Paulson together is nicely effective and reasonably free of the hitting you over the head emotionalism that a lesser director would've went for. When the film ends however you kind of realize that not a whole lot really happened and that the journey that Wes Bently made and the lessons he's supposed to have learned regarding the way he's been living his life don't feel all that true. Even tho i did like the performance of the actress who played his wife (Ahna O'Reily) who i thought did a very effective job showing the frustrations living with this obsessive painter was having on her life during the couple of scenes she was in. (Or as Langella says to Bentley regarding her "Artists can't have families, it takes away from their art") Honestly i just think the film either needed more meat to its rather slim story, or failing that more maybe some more substantial scenes between Bentely and Langella--I'm not entirely sure what this film needed more of but i definitely feel like it needed more of something for it to have felt worth watching and thinking about as a whole but OK.