RARE OBJECTS - Mark Reviews Movies

Rare Objects, IFC Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 13, 2023

The characters in Rare Objects seem to exist primarily to fit a central metaphor. In co-writer/director Katie Holmes' movie, the metaphor is that people, like things, can break, and whether or not they can be mended after comes down to an assortment of internal feelings and thoughts, as well as plenty of external forces. This idea is sound enough wisdom that it's essentially an obvious and redundant statement, but repeatedly pointing it out is about as far and deep as the movie is willing to take the notion.

As such, Holmes and Phaedon Papadopoulos' screenplay gives us a variety of characters dealing with different issues. All of them are miserable, and each one is trying his or her best to move forward with life in the only ways they know how. That's the start and about the end of the whole story.

The story comes from the novel by Kathleen Tessaro, which apparently is set during the Great Depression, but the screenwriters change the backdrop to the modern day, during either the height of or the decline of COVID-19 pandemic (Background characters are regularly wearing masks, but our main characters only don them in a few scenes). One can kind of intuit why the filmmakers made the shift, considering certain connections of economic anxiety and widespread health concerns between the two periods, but just as the characters vaguely exist to make a broad point, the backdrop only hints at some deeper idea that the move doesn't care to examine or explore.

Our main character is Benita (Julia Mayorga), the college-aged daughter of an immigrant mother from Mexico. At the beginning, she's in the mental health wing of a hospital, being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder. Some flashbacks reveal that, while at a local bar in her college town, Benita was approached by a charming and seemingly kind young man (played by Jimi Stanton), only for the stranger to force her into a bathroom and sexually assault her.

The violence is only suggested here, but the movie's apparent generosity in trying to look for and at the pain of as many characters as possible leads to an isolated and, hence, miscalculated scene of the rapist apologizing to and crying over Benita just after threatening her life. It's such a specific moment that it stands out as odd, mainly because Holmes and Papadopoulos don't always extend such consideration to the other characters here.

The story proper starts with Benita returning to the safety of home to live with her mother (played by Saundra Santiago) after dropping out of college. She starts looking for a job and, after a lot of rejections, finds one at an antiques shop co-owned and run by Peter (Alan Cumming). Despite not knowing much about the business (a fact that's brushed over or contradicted repeatedly), Benita excels, especially when Diana (Holmes) and her brother James (David Alexander Flinn), the wealthy children of a famous artist, take a liking to her.

Benita already knows Diana, we learn through some more flashbacks, from the hospital, where Diana was institutionalized by her mother for substance addiction. Upon reuniting, the two become fast friends, but as Benita flourishes despite her painful past, Diana continues to struggle with addiction in spite or because of her privileged background.

Their friendship is at the core of the movie, which is questionable for a number of reasons. Firstly, it puts Benita's experiences and challenges off to the side, because Diana's larger-than-life personality and showy struggles take up more energy than the quiet and quietly suffering Benita (played in a far too understated manner by Mayorga). Secondly, the movie never convinces us that this friendship would exist under any circumstances beyond the contrived ones established and maintained by the plot. Thirdly, Diana's presence as the apparent height of tragedy here overshadows every other character here—from Bentia, to the young woman's mother (who is fired, questioning her place in this country, and worried about a sick sibling), to Peter (still grieving a painful loss), to the store's other owner Winshaw (Derek Luke), who arrives out of the blue in the third act and never quite fits into the already-established narrative.

The whole thing is a tough sell—not because of the content, which is at least somewhat honest and initially compelling as we learn about these characters and their situations, but because of the limits imposed by the filmmakers. It's never really about these people, since the movie focuses almost entirely on their respective problems, or how the connections they make help with the process of moving forward, because these relationships also never advance.

To be fair, Holmes' heart is in the right place (although casting herself as a character who takes over the drama is a little suspicious), but Rare Objects constantly shortchanges its characters, its dramatic potential, and its themes. That's especially true of the ending, which feels like an anticlimax because it wants to have both the tragedy and the optimism of living with such pain. As a result, it accomplishes neither.

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