Rosemarie Dewitt

Touchy Feely: just watch the trailer instead

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Josh Pais and Rosemarie DeWitt in TOUCHY FEELY

OK, maybe I just shouldn’t keep expecting writer-director Lynn Shelton to make the first mumblecore movie that I will like.  Touchy Feely begins with a promising premise – a massage therapist (Rosemarie DeWitt)  suddenly develops an aversion to touching the human body, which understandably threatens both her career and her relationship with her boyfriend.  Unfortunately, Shelton takes both the premise and the excellent cast and crashes them into a crater of boredom.

Shelton made last year’s Your Sister’s Sister (also with DeWitt), which was really good for about 58 minutes, until it petered out in a senseless musical interlude and a montage of rainy bike riding.  In Touchy Feely, the massage therapist addresses her affliction by moping and yakking and encountering Ron Livingston and moping and yakking some more.  There’s a fun thread about her quirky uncle’s dental practice, but that’s entirely disconnected from the protagonist’s story.

DeWitt was exceptional in Your Sister’s Sister and uniformly excellent in Rachel Getting Married, Promised Land and Margaret – and Touchy Feely is not DeWitt’s fault.  The fine actors Ellen Page, Scoot McNairy (Argo), Alison Janney and Josh Pais are similarly wasted.

Now I tend to like character-driven, talky movies.  But I don’t like to watch self-involved twits obsess over their own avoidable, First World problems.  That pretty much describes the mumblecore genre, especially when the male characters have bedhead.  (This movie could have been even worse – the Gigli, Ishtar or Moment by Moment of mumblecore – had Greta Gerwig played Alison Janney’s role.)

There’s one really funny scene in Touchy Feely – where Alison Janney introduces the painfully awkward Josh Pais to Reiki.  Other than that, just watch the trailer – it’s much better than the movie and it will cost you less than three minutes of your remaining lifetime.

Touchy Feely is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Netflix Instant, Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, Google Play and XBOX Video.

Promised Land: so good until the corny ending

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Promised Land is an engaging drama about the exploitation of natural gas in rural America –  until the corny ending.  Matt Damon and Frances McDormand play a team of corporate road warriors who persuade farmers to lease their land for the fracking.  Based on the experience of his own hometown, the Damon character believes that the American rural way of life has become an unsustainable myth, that small farming communities are doomed without the cash from natural gas.  He believes that he is suckering them into their own salvation.

It’s an “issue movie”of the kind that I often dislike. My day job is in   public policy, and I see more nuance and tradeoffs than usually make it into these movies, which are often too “black hat/white hat” for my taste.  Promised Land doesn’t fall into that trap because Damon’s character and because the locals are not uniformly saintly.  Most of the struggling farmers can’t sign their leases fast enough.  Ken Strunk plays an elected official right out of Mark Twain’s Hadleyburg.  Lucas Black plays a guy who is a puddle of bad choices waiting to be made.  Scoot McNairy (Argo) plays an inarticulate man of firm principles; he’s right, but he doesn’t know why.

Director Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, Elephant, Paranoid Park, Milk) creates a rural community that is completely authentic without using clichés.   Damon is outstanding.  McDormand, John Krasinski, a frisky Rosemarie DeWitt (Rachel Getting Married, Your Sister’s Sister) and Hal Holbrook are all reliably excellent.

Unfortunately, after navigating through the conflicting values, difficult tradeoffs and shades of gray that are found in real life, the movie takes the easy way out – an improbable ending that is happy for all.  Too bad – a little cynicism would have gone a long way here.

Your Sister’s Sister: a promising premise and a superb performance wasted

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Your Sister’s Sister wastes a promising premise and the talents of three good actors, one of whom gives a superb performance.

A young man (Mark Duplass) is grieving a loss and his friend (Emily Blunt) suggests that he spend some time at her family’s remote island getaway cabin.  Unbeknownst to them, her sister (Rosemarie Dewitt) is already staying at the cabin.  The guy and the sister get drunk on his first night at the cabin, and the friend shows up unannounced the next morning.  Each of the three does not know a key fact about the other two.  So far so good.

In fact, it’s an excellent dramedy for two-thirds of the movie until the sister bursts out with something like, “I wouldn’t have [spoiler] if I knew that [spoiler]”.  At this point, writer-director Lynne Shelton runs out of creativity and resorts to the dreaded musical interlude, in which each of the characters stomp or bike through the rainy Northwest as the music swells to set up an ending that drew loud derisive hoots from the theater audience.

Too bad, because the actors are very good.  Mark Duplass plays the smart, talented, underachieving, goofy and sweet big lug usually played by Jason Segal or Seth Rogen.  Emily Blunt plays the sarcastic, funny, smart, vulnerable and adorable cutie usually played by Emily Blunt.  But Rosemarie Dewitt creates a wholly original and utterly authentic character that looks like a real person, someone we know in real life.  All of her actions and reactions are completely authentic, whether she’s drinking way too much tequila, pondering her failed relationship or tasting her own vegan pancakes.   Dewitt was also very good as Rachel in Rachel’s Getting Married, and her performance is so good in Your Sister’s Sister that I can’t wait to see her on screen again.