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(Now on DVD)

As you can probably tell, I haven’t managed to make it to too many movies in theaters lately. Having a new day-job really cuts into a girl’s movie-going, despite the fact that the position itself is intensely cinephile-friendly. While the whole New York film world is agog with the Lincoln Center’s annual festival, which today kicked off with George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck, I’ve been catching up with random titles now available on DVD. Though I’ll be able to catch a few NYFF films soon, in the meantime . . .

While narrative strands focusing on father-son relationships constitute a significant running theme in American cinema, seldom does a film delve into the daily details of those dynamics in such a singularly naturalistic fashion as Winter Solstice. With remarkable dexterity, writer-director Mark Sternfeld captures the jostling for authority and independence underlying the simplest of interactions between his three male leads, layering the characteristic antagonism of teenage boys towards the paternal figure with an unspoken sadness issuing from the absence of their mother. Each, in his own way, quietly deals with this loss; family patriarch Jim Winters (played with glum conviction by Anthony LaPaglia) somnambulantly goes about his gardening business, Pete (Mark Webber) flails in his classes, and Gabe (Aaron Stanford) wrestles with a decision to flee to Florida. Though it takes place during the height of summer, perpetually hazy skies and accompanying washed-out colors convey a contrapuntally somber atmosphere.

And then, of course, along comes a woman, Molly Ripkin (in the form of the gracefully awkward Allison Janney), and though she embodies the well-worn role of revitalizing stranger, her description is less quirkily romantic and central than others in the same vein (think Juliette Lewis in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? or Geena Davis in The Accidental Tourist). She doesn’t transform the lives of the Winters, as such character types are wont to do, but the freshness of her presence triggers a subtle shifting which nudges Jim towards baby steps away from his protective inertia.

A purely slice-of-life representation, Winter Solstice makes no attempt to psychoanalyze its characters. Eschewing tidy explanations or epiphanies, its lack of grandiose pretensions and elegantly pared-down dialogue afford it an admirable restraint. But at the same time, this reserve can also be construed as an inchoateness, and the movie occasionally plays so self-effacingly that it nearly absents itself into non-existence. A stark avoidance of blown-up moments of feeling signals a desire on the part of the director to distinguish his material from others in the domestic melodrama genre (often the province of the “chick flick”) but, ultimately, this (masculine withholding, perhaps?) renders the film emotionally benign; not quite carefully-observed enough to accrue the force or depth it needs to promote it from airy abstraction to something of substance, it lacks the impact you walk away feeling it should’ve possessed. At the end of the day, despite its heavy title, Winter Solstice floats too much like a feather.

- km

(Now on DVD)

Despite its outré antics, Todd Solondz’s latest, Palindromes, can be distilled into the simple phrase uttered to our main character, by her mother (Ellen Barkin), during the first fifteen minutes: “You’ll always be you.”

The conceit finds physical manifestation in Solondz’s casting of eight different actors to play the palindromic Aviva, an assortment of wildly divergent physical types spanning age, size, race, even gender, and the consistency of character achieved in the face of such obvious dissonance is quite amazing. A tremulous way of speaking, an almost otherworldly wide-eyed innocence, and a disconcerting permissiveness provide the through-lines to the many incarnations this troubled 13-year-old girl takes.

Regardless of its galling gimmickry, there is something strangely touching about this high-concept trope; it has a leveling capacity more pronounced than the film’s overt socio-political content. But just when you start to think Palindromes might be a celebration of diversity, Aviva, fueled by a baby-lust which has her roaming the wilds of suburban New Jersey, among other places, stumbles upon Mama Sunshine’s house of Jesus-loving freaks. This adoptive family, which includes a blind albino, an armless little person, and a host of other disabled children, initially seems a utopia of inclusiveness, but then Solondz lets his trademark smirk shine through. In the short span of a repugnant scene that has the kids dancing and singing Godrock, donning headsets while sticking closely to cheesy choreography, I found myself switching camps. Normally a fan of the director (his geek parades in Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness struck me as far more loving than generally presumed), I’ve never given much credence to his detractors’ arguments – revolving largely around a belief that he’s just a snickering schoolboy without sympathy - until now.

Peculiarly one-dimensional for such a belabored affair, Solondz, like Alexander Payne before him (see Citizen Ruth), skewers the pro-life and pro-choice factions alike, but does so with far less acuity. His experimentalism aspires to profundity, for which he deserves credit, but soon devolves into a game of Spot-the-Palindrome (Bob? Check. Otto? Got it) sadly devoid of deeper meaning.

- km

I’m a sucker for a good romantic comedy but, because they rarely contain an organic sense of the magical to them anymore, what with plugged-in big-name stars and not much else to recommend the feature, I can see why they get such a bad rap. Often, the tropes that structure the genre – the meet-cute, the misunderstanding, the marriage – are far too visible to the naked eye, and since we all want our familiar stories cloaked in a guise of newness, it’s no wonder many attempts fail miserably.

So it’s no surprise that the most successful of recent incarnations involve an extensive overhauling of conventions. Kevin Smith got it right with Chasing Amy, ingeniously crafting a romantic comedy guys would actually want to see with their girlfriends via a more honest inclusion of sex and swearing into what has typically been a squeaky-clean, PG-rated affair. Likewise, the Farrelly Brothers, taking the goopy schmaltz factor associated with the genre and twisting it into the gross-out humor of There’s Something About Mary. And Australian director P.J. Hogan delightfully refreshed the form in Muriel’s Wedding by inserting female comradeship as an important factor in the search for a relationship, going so far as to suggest the blasphemous (at least within the domain of the romantic comedy): that marriage might not be the be-all and end-all.

So too does creator Michael Showalter triumph over the odds with his rendition, by bringing into focus characters usually left by the wayside in romcoms – “the Baxter”; that is, the nice-but-flavorless guy who always gets left at the alter (think Bill Pullman in Sleepless in Seattle), and his matching female counterpart, the covertly cute girl overlooked in favor of the more glamorously beautiful.

Next to Showalter’s Comedy Central Show, Stella - hilariously dorked-out infantilism taken to the extreme - The Baxter, sweetly daffy and random as it is, seems positively lucid. Though compatriots Michael Ian Black (always my favorite commentator on VH1’s “I Love the ___’s”) and David Wain make appearances, this is Showalter’s show. As gentle and out-of-it Elliot, he’s oddly appealing, his ability to arrange his facial features into a mask of utter blankness inspiring mirth without a word. The rest of the cast also turn in fun performances: Michelle Williams, as the “adorable temp” is, appropriately, adorable. And, as the two shiny, happy people customarily the nuclei of the romantic comedy but here relocated to the sidelines, Elizabeth Banks (who seems to be everywhere these days) and Justin Theroux (continuing to mine his quietly subversive appeal), are deeply entertaining. Banks uses the cheesy properties of her plasticine beauty while Theroux likewise plays off the brooding connotations of his dark good looks to stellar effect; both bring a meta-awareness to their roles as mockingly-exaggerated versions of the leading-man and -lady.

The plot points are unimportant, since, as is the starting point in romantic comedies, we know immediately which people belong together. It’s not revolutionary, but The Baxter makes the formula feel fresh again, and reminds us why we always return back home to genre movies for good comfort food in times of escapist need.

- km