The Time Being

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.

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.

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.

I guess we don't have enough interest in films thar require thinking and talking about afterwards ? Maybe one day soon we will accept a smaller audience As quality, rather than the mainstream circus of false ratings, I am no mainstream judge for others but I love the serenity in this movie, Best review these times is the fact that i would watch with a mask and be content to smell my own breath after an omelet with garlic.

a great actor. a strange subject. nuances of atmosphere. all as bones and flesh of a movie who can remember Lucian Freud art or American Beauty.it is a film from images and silence. a kind of parable. or only a lesson.Frank Langella is the locomotive of this interesting project. Sarah Paulson - the delicate spice.Wes Bentley- only a silhouette lost in middle of details. it is a beautiful movie. not exactly good. only beautiful. a kind of embroidery, a precise puzzle, a story about choices, maybe, version of Faust pact. the best ingredient - expectation of viewer. the worse - hope to remark Wes Bentley in a special role. but director intuition remains remarkable - Frank Langella is the best and the others, including the script, may be his mirrors.