Leading ladies

Parker Posey, Parker Posey, Parker Posey -- there are three good reasons to watch Broken English (2007, MC-61, NFX), Zoe Cassavetes’ debut bid to join the ranks of independent writer-directors with her father and brother.  Yeah, you could just call it a downbeat Sex & the City, but then there’s Parker.  She’s a thirtysomething Sarah Lawrence grad working in guest relations at a Manhattan hotel, while begging for love with one hand and pushing it away with the other.  The foolish choices of this smart woman include drinking and abuse of prescription drugs, along with generalized social dysfunction.  She should just be a pain in the ass, but Parker makes her face a map of ever-changing emotions, and it’s impossible not to feel with her, as annoying as her character may be.  Ms. Cassavetes lines up an impressive cast, starting with her mother Gena Rowlands, to play -- in a real stretch – the protagonist’s mother.  Reminiscent of minor Sofia Coppola, this film stands on the basis of the central performance, and if you’re going to cop an ending directly from another film, then Before Sunset is a good one to steal from.

Michelle Williams is similarly the best reason to watch My Week with Marilyn (2011, MC-65, NFX).  She offers a highly plausible impersonation of Marilyn Monroe, while somehow remaining her own adorable self.  Kenneth Branagh also makes an amusingly spot-on Laurence Olivier, in this true-ish story of the making of The Princess and the Showgirl in 1956, told from the perspective of the third assistant director, played with freckled awe by Eddie Redmayne.  He becomes Marilyn's keeper and confidante of sorts, and of course falls madly in love, worshipping that goddess of ripe femininity.  Simon Curtis’ film is not a chore to watch, but it never caught fire for me, remaining more truthy than truthful.  Nonethess Michelle as Marilyn is charming.

As is Felicity Jones in Like Crazy (2011, MC-71, NFX), a Sundance audience award winner.  Directed by Drake Doremus, this film is a largely-improvised account of the joys and sorrows of young love.  Anton Yelchen as her male counterpart is appealing too, and together they bring a genuine ache and fire to proceedings that are a bit thin and unconvincing dramatically, carried by pop song montages rather than the authentic playing out of emotions and life choices.  Still I didn’t mind spending time in the company of these young people and their romantic dilemmas.  She’s in LA on a student visa from Britain, when she meets a cute furniture designer, and overstays her visa to spend the summer with him, which prevents her from returning to the U.S. and sets up the kernel of conflict, since neither lover can join the other on native ground.  Will they go their separate ways, or are they truly meant for each other?  For an hour or two, I was willing to see such questions from their youthfully self-important perspectives, reliving the familiar formative experiences of love and loss.  In the moment the emotions loom larger than the fairly flimsy construct does in retrospect, but in the right mood you won’t mind the lovebirds’ company and the feelings they evoke.

Charlize Theron is anything but charming in Young Adult (2011, MC-71, NFX).  She’s the “psychotic prom queen bitch” who returns to her hick hometown in Minnesota, where she sets out to reclaim her high school boyfriend, who is married and newly a father.  She’s gone on to mini-celebrity in the “Minni-Apple,” where she ghostwrites a series of young adult novels, but her home life is a series of drunken one-night stands and neglect of her little handbag pooch.  In town she meets another of her high school classmates, played by Patton Oswalt, whom she had totally ignored back then, but now bonds with over the taste of bourbon.  While she was prom queen, he was beaten and maimed by a gang for being gay, which he wasn’t.  Director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody re-team after Juno, but drain their protagonist of any sweetness and light, leaving a comically discomforting she-devil.  Charlize gets her comeuppance, but thankfully learns no life lessons, in this tart little farce.  Don’t hate her for being beautiful, hate her for her noxious personality.