Love After Love

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.

This is one of the worst movies I have seen in a long time. I have nothing good to say about it. In retrospect, I wonder if it was made to reboot Andie MacDowell's movie career. If so, it was a poor choice because the role and her acting in it were terrible. From beginning to weird end it was a major misfire. It does not deserve even one star.

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.

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.

The movie purports to be about grief. What we see is all the dysfunction expressed as projected rage, alcoholism, and all the function as "getting on with it." What we don't see is how the "grief" has transformed these people. We never get to see them transform. For all we know we may not be seeing just grief but personalities that have always been that way. It ain't pretty for the son's who dissolve into childishness, and it's hopeful for the widow who hews to maturity. It certainly does not paint a nice picture of liberal elitists.