|
|
TROUBLE (2018)
Director: Theresa Rebeck Cast: Anjelica Huston, Bill Pullman, David Morse, Jim Parrack, Brian d'Arcy James, Julia Stiles, Victor Williams MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:40 Release Date: 10/12/18 (limited) |
|
Review by Mark Dujsik | October 11, 2018 There's a fair amount to like about Trouble, a comedy about a brother and sister who have let decades of animosity and resentment build up, without addressing the core of the problem. There are the performances, primarily from Anjelica Huston and Bill Pullman as the siblings, who get into a big fight again over land that they inherited from their father. There's the way that the characters' relationship evolves through a series of arguments and schemes, as well as a well-aimed gunshot that does just enough damage to be a problem—but not enough to be too significant an issue. That last part, though, also gets to the heart of some of the unavoidable problems with the movie. They are mostly ones of tone. Here, we get an almost wacky setup, involving a conflict that feels as if it could have come out of a silent-era comedy—an age when familial land disputes like this were prevalent everywhere and when the movies would assume that a gunshot could be so perfectly, comically placed. If writer/director Theresa Rebeck's story continued down that path of screwball comedy, we'd see all of its coincidences, lucky events, and easy resolutions in that vein. Maggie (Huston) and Ben (Pullman) get into their current squabble when Ben starts building a house on land that he sold to his sister and her late husband. Ben has some paperwork, which his son Curt (Jim Parrack) unofficially obtained through his girlfriend Rachel (Julia Stiles) at a local government office. Throughout Ben and his son's various plots to make his landholding official, the siblings' mutual friend Gerry (David Morse) attempts to set things right between them. It's a fine premise for a comedy, but instead, the movie wants to go a bit deeper. It almost feels unfair to criticize Rebeck's approach in that regard, but the point remains: As this movie tries to illuminate its characters' issues and find a way to reconcile them, the established tone and comedic approach of the earlier sections don't match what the movie ultimately tries to do. It doesn't help that there's an attempted patricide that everyone seems to forget. The complicated situations of Trouble work for comedy. By the time the story switches gears, though, things have escalated so much that the movie's dramatic turns feel insincere, unlikely, and too easily resolved. Copyright © 2018 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
Buy Related Products
|
