Gillian Robespierre’s last teaming with Jenny Slate, Obvious Child, was an acerbic comedy that at the same time was an achingly honest portrayal of Gen-X romance and the emotional toll of abortion. It was serious but not overly dour. With Landline, Robespierre and co-writer Elisabeth Holm explore the infinitely complex world of infidelity in a generational tale of a mother and her two daughters. As a sophomore feature, it patently expands her scope of character and narrative and tests her ability to juggle an ensemble cast and multiple storylines. While not as funny or original as her debut, Landline shows the director’s commitment to tackling taboo subjects and humanizing them through messy, lived-in characters all through the lens of female leads.
Set in 1995, the film first introduces us to Dana (Jenny Slate), a recently engaged 20-something having a quarter-life crisis about what her future. She’s the Type A older sister to Ali (Abby Quinn), a teenager ready to have sex for the first time with her high school boyfriend. When Ali finds erotic love poems written by her father, Alan (John Turturro), about “C,” she suspects that he is cheating on their mother, Pat (Edie Falco). The sisters band together to uncover the truth before their mother finds out. The sticking point for both of them is that Dana, in her pre-marriage anxiety, ran into Nate (Finn Wittrock), an old college fling, and has been cheating on her fiancé, Ben (Jay Duplass). In Ali’s starry-eyed view of love, she accuses them of being a “family of cheaters.”
Yet Alan is the picture of a Nice Guy, an ad man who still clings to his dream of being a playwright. His wife and daughters have always humored him, but based on their reactions during a reading of his new play, have never enjoyed his work. As opposed to Pat, a no-frills businesswoman, he’s meek. Their relationship seems strained from the beginning of the film, but we still see glimpses of their lasting connection. To its credit, Landline challenges viewers with cheaters who are, at heart, good people and toys with that contradiction. And that, in effect, is what plays on Dana’s mind – that she is also an adulterer and can’t judge her father too harshly.
The film struggles in its very ensemble and multi-plot structure, which tends to make it feel as if these characters are cobbled together from other films – and ones that many have seen before. Pat, Dana and Ali’s stories converge around Alan’s infidelity, but the latter two, specifically, are distinct within Landline, working so hard to portray a period and life-stage realism that they at times detach themselves from the overall narrative.
Landline was inspired by Robespierre and Holm’s own parents’ divorce, and perhaps that’s why the film feels like it sticks far too closely to the familiar. Obvious Child was a groundbreaking take on a divisive subject; Landline truly doesn’t bring much of anything new to dysfunctional families and infidelity. At best, it portrays a family – and, in Alan and Dana, a father and daughter – that through similar experiences can come to an emotional understanding. Such an understanding doesn’t preclude them from disapproving or being hurt. There’s an undercurrent of commentary on gender norms vis-à-infidelity, but the film’s reliance on stereotypical characters overwhelms its strengths.
The post Landline appeared first on Spectrum Culture.