A STUDY IN INSECURITY

I am a sucker for understatement in the movies. I hate it when a writer, director or actor feels like they have to hit me over the head to make a point. "I'm pretty intelligent!," I always want to scream. "You don't have to spell everything out for me in ten-foot letters!" I find you can often say more with less.

Last night's offering, LOVELY & AMAZING, was a perfect example of the kind of quiet film that I like. One that reveals its characters and their struggles with subtlety and indirection, rather than with hystrionics. I loved all of the characters, and felt like their internal battles and neuroses made perfect sense, just after watching them interact with each other through the first few scenes, as if spying on their daily lives.

I thought director Holofcener did a wonderful job of tweaking the intensity and developing a creeping sense of emotional dread, without resorting to obvious ploys. Three cheers for a film that so delicately veers away from the expected into the frequently touching and hilarious. By the time Michelle and Annie ended up at the McDonald's, I found myself crying quite unexpectedly. A totally brilliant scene of sparse, carefully calibrated dialogue and a lot of silence.

I think we all know that Catherine Keener is one of the greatest actresses out there, and in this film I saw in her a brittle fragility, a gloomy intensity that I hadn't detected in any of her other performances. She's joined in this film by a tremendous cast of a lot of people you know, but I have to say that Raven Goodwin as Annie may have stolen the show from this formidable group of Hollywood regulars.