Broken English (Zoe R. Cassavetes, 2007)

Gena Rowlands and Parker Posey in Broken English

Cast: Parker Posey, Melvil Poupaud, Drea de Matteo, Justin Theroux, Gena Rowlands, Peter Bogdanovich, Tim Guinee, Roy Thinnes, Dana Ivey, Bernadette Lafont, Thierry Hancisse. Screenplay: Zoe R. Cassavetes. Cinematography: John Pirozzi. Production design: Happy Massee. Film editing: Andrew Weisblum. Music: Scratch Massive. 

The ending of Broken English is a direct copy, down to the dialogue, of the ending of Richard Linklater's Before Sunset (2004), a movie about a fractured relationship that finds a satisfactory resolution. This similarity can only be an homage, but it shows up the comparative lack of originality in Zoe R. Cassavetes' film. In fact, the copy is so blatant, and the plotline of Broken English is so familiar that I hope Cassavetes' intention was to parody romantic comedies, especially those about young women who have trouble finding satisfactory men. Unfortunately, the parody doesn't go far enough to relieve the sense I have of a movie gone flat. Parker Posey plays Nora Wilder, a young woman with a good job who is anxious about her future without a steady relationship with a man. She has a failed fling with an actor (Justin Theroux) that leaves her more in the dumps, but then she meets a lanky, easy-going Frenchman (Melvil Poupaud) who manages to overcome her anxieties and defense mechanisms. But then he returns to France, leaving his cell number with her. It's a fine cast: Posey displays her exceptional gift for edgy humor and Drea de Matteo fits nicely into the familiar role of the best friend and confidante. The invaluable Gena Rowlands rises above her role as the stereotypical mother who wants her to get married. And Poupaud, smoking like a chimney, is a steady foil for Nora's jitteryness. But by the time the movie gets Nora to Paris and the city casts its patented romantic spell over things, including a stereotypical older Frenchman (Thierry Hancisse) who imparts his worldly wisdom, we get the feeling we've seen it all before.   

Personal Velocity: Three Portraits (Rebecca Miller, 2002)

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Clockwatchers (Jill Sprecher, 1997)

Parker Posey, Toni Collette, Lisa Kudrow, and Alanna Ubach in Clockwatchers

Cast: Toni Collette, Parker Posey, Lisa Kudrow, Alanna Ubach, Helen FitzGerald, Stanley DeSantis, Jamie Kennedy, David James Elliott, Debra Jo Rupp, Kevin Cooney, Bob Balaban, Paul Dooley. Screenplay: Jill Sprecher, Karen Sprecher. Cinematography: Jim Denault. Production design: Pamela Marcotte. Film editing: Stephen Mirrione. Music: Mader. 

Blessed are the meek, they say. Certainly Iris (Toni Collette) qualifies as meek when, on her first day as a temp at a credit company, she does as she's told and sits patiently for a very long time until Barbara (Debra Jo Rupp), the human resources manager, sees her and scolds her for not letting anyone know she was there. Self-effacing to a fault, Iris soon finds herself with a group of new friends, all temps who have been "temporary" for quite a while (a dodge companies use to keep from paying benefits). Each of them is more outgoing than Iris: Margaret (Parker Posey) is sassy and subversive, eager to point out to Iris ways to do as little work as possible. Paula (Lisa Kudrow) claims to be just passing time while waiting for her big break as an actress. Jane (Alanna Ubach) is engaged and can't wait until marriage frees her from office work. Iris's father (Paul Dooley), meanwhile, is urging her to get a good job in sales, something that her shyness makes her unsuitable for. This is the setup for Jill Sprecher's satire on contemporary work in the kind of office, scored to the artificial peppiness of Muzak, that anyone who ever worked for a corporation that values productivity over creativity, routine over initiative, and regimentation over individuality will recognize. In Clockwatchers, meekness wins out: Iris lasts longer in the job than her friends, even after the company makes their work lives more miserable than ever. But she's bested by an employee even meeker than she is, but who adds sneakiness to the meekness. As satire, I happen to think the film is a little too low key, and that the casting of vivid actresses like Posey and Kudrow, wonderful as they are, works against the mood of the film, but it has the ring of truth throughout.  

Party Girl (Daisy von Scherler Mayer, 1995)

Parker Posey in Party Girl

Cast: Parker Posey, Anthony DeSando, Guillermo Díaz, Donna Mitchell, Liev Schreiber, Omar Townsend, Sasha von Scherler, Becky Mode, Simon Verhoeven. Screenplay: Harry Birckmayer, Daisy von Scherler Mayer, Sheila Gaffney. Cinematography: Michael Slovis. Production design: Kevin Thompson. Film editing: Cara Silverman. Music: Anton Sanko. 

With its larky portrayal of the Manhattan club scene of the 1990s, Party Girl reminded me of those "swinging London" movies of the 1960s, like Richard Lester's The Knack ... and How to Get It (1965). You might even think of Parker Posey as the Rita Tushingham of the '90s. But The Knack now feels tired and dated, while Party Girl remains fresh. Or maybe I feel a special affection for Party Girl because I spent my youth mastering the Dewey Decimal System instead of partying, and it's nice to see a movie that validates my lifestyle, even ironically. Party Girl also is ethnically and sexually more diverse than those '60s movies were, or could have been. The odd thing is that a lot of critics of the time didn't get it. A British reviewer bosleycrowthered, "If bad behaviour and smugness were truly charming, Party Girl might be as much fun as it thinks it is." And even Roger Ebert dismissed it, saying that Posey's character's "life is disorganized, ... but the script could nevertheless organize its approach to her, so the audience wouldn't feel as confused as she is most of the time.... But the movie never pulls itself together." Which I think misses the point: Why ask for an eight-course meal when what you really want is a falafel with hot sauce, a side order of baba ganoush, and a seltzer? 

Fay Grim (Hal Hartley, 2006)

Parker Posey in Fay Grim

Cast: Parker Posey, James Urbaniak, Liam Aiken, Jeff Goldblum, Chuck Montgomery, Leo Fitzpatrick, Saffron Burrows, Jasmine Tabatabai, Elina Löwensohn, Thomas Jay Ryan, Anatole Taubman. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Sarah Cawley. Production design: Richard Sylvarnes. Film editing: Hal Hartley. Music: Hal Hartley.  

Fay Grim (Parker Posey) is having a bad day: Her husband is missing, her brother is in prison, and her son is about to be kicked out of school. Soon this will look like one of the better days. Fay Grim is another of Hal Hartley's ventures into subverting a genre, particularly the espionage thriller. But it's also filtered through another genre, one you might call "the Sandra Bullock movie." At least I call it that because it brought to mind the last Sandra Bullock movie I saw, The Last City (Adam Nee, Aaron Nee, 2022), in which she plays a woman who gets swept up into an unexpected adventure. Bullock is not the only actress who lands in that kind of film, but she's been the prototypical heroine of them since her breakthrough movie, Speed (Jan de Bont, 1994). In Fay Grim Posey fits the part as well as or even better than Bullock. It's nominally a sequel to Henry Fool (1997), in which Hal Hartley introduced us to Fay, her brother, Simon (James Urbaniak), and the enigmatic Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan). All you need to know from that film is that Fay and Henry had a son, Ned (Liam Aiken), and that Simon went to prison because he helped Henry flee the country to avoid a murder rap. Now, an Agent Fulbright (Jeff Goldblum) from the CIA is suddenly in touch with Fay to see if she knows the whereabouts of the notebooks Henry kept. He claimed to be writing a sort of confessional novel that publishers had told him was unpublishable. Henry is dead, Fulbright tells her, but the notebooks may have significance no one has previously suspected. And so begins an elaborate chase that takes Fay to Paris and Istanbul, and involves Simon (whom she gets sprung from prison) and Ned (who receives a mysterious clue in the mail), as well as a lot of intelligence agents and terrorists from all over Europe and the Middle East. Fay Grim becomes as intrepid as Jason Bourne or James Bond in the process. Posey's performance holds it all together and makes me wonder why she's not as big a star as Bullock. It's fun to see some of these characters again, but by wading so deeply into spy spoof territory Hartley has lost the control that made Henry Fool such a fresh new start for his career, and some of his recently acquired mannerisms -- like the tilted camera, the so-called "Dutch angle" -- are tiresome.  

Columbus (Kogonada, 2017)

Haley Lu Richardson and John Cho in Columbus

Cast: John Cho, Haley Lu Richardson, Parker Posey, Michelle Forbes, Rory Culkin. Screenplay: Kogonada. Cinematography: Elisha Christian. Production design: Diana Rice. Film editing: Kogonada. Music: Hammock.

Kogonada's debut feature, Columbus, had a lot of critics scrounging for superlatives, one of them being a comparison to the films of the master director Yasujiro Ozu. Which is apt, considering that Kogonada is a pseudonym -- his birth name is a slyly guarded secret -- derived from that of Ozu's co-screenwriter, Kogo Noda. But the filmmaker that Columbus most reminded me of was Éric Rohmer, whose films, like Claire's Knee (1970) and My Night at Maud's (1969), typically center on a man and a woman talking. Sometimes sex is involved, but usually only as one of the things they talk about. The man in Columbus is Jin (John Cho), a Korean in early middle age who works as a translator of books in English. The woman is Cassandra, called Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), not long out of high school and working in a library until she decides on a course for her life. They meet in the small city of Columbus, Indiana, which is chiefly famous for the many buildings -- churches, banks, schools, and so on -- designed by famous architects like the Saarinens, I.M. Pei, Cesar Pelli, and others. Jin is in Columbus because his father, an architect, went there to give a lecture but suffered a stroke and is comatose in the hospital. Casey is there because she grew up in Columbus and hasn't yet decided to leave because her mother (Michelle Forbes) is a recovering drug addict. Jin is estranged from his father but bound against his will by Korean family tradition to stay near to him. Casey would like to leave Columbus and have a career, but she fears what may happen to her mother if she does. They're both single, though Jin has a longstanding crush on his father's assistant, Eleanor (Parker Posey), who accompanied his father to Columbus and remains there after his stroke. Casey is carrying on a flirtation with Gabriel (Rory Culkin), a co-worker at the library who's more interested in her than she is in him. Jin and Casey meet, he bums a cigarette from her -- there's an awful lot of smoking in the film, a reason why the film echoes French movies for me -- and they start to talk. Over the next few days in Columbus they will talk about architecture as they wander through some of the city's landmark buildings, and they will talk about life, family, culture, and so on. In a more conventional film, the talk would lead to romance, and there is a kind of spark between Jin and Casey, but Kogonada isn't interested in making a conventional film. Instead, he leaves us to ponder the substance of the talk, the beauty and function of architecture, and the nature of relationships. Which makes Columbus sound more abstract than it is: Cho, Richardson, and the rest of the cast create people that are as real and individual as the settings through which they wander.

 

The Daytrippers (Greg Mottola, 1996)

Hope Davis, Liev Schreiber, and Parker Posey in The Daytrippers

Cast: Hope Davis, Anne Meara, Parker Posey, Liev Schreiber, Pat McNamara, Stanley Tucci, Campbell Scott, Stephanie Venditto, Marc Grapey, Douglas McGrath, Marcia Gay Harden. Screenplay: Greg Mottola. Cinematography: John Inwood. Production design: Bonnie J. Brinkley. Film editing: Anne McCabe. Music: Richard Martinez.

The Daytrippers is a mashup of subgenres: It's a road movie, a marital dramedy, a midlife crisis fable, and even an extended mother-in-law joke. No wonder it took so long to find a distributor: How do you market a movie like this? But it's also a wonderful sleeper find, if you just happen to come across it on the Criterion Channel, as I did. First of all, it's a terrific ensemble of skilled actors, some of them cast against type, like Marcia Gay Harden as a ditz in an extended cameo. The premise is this: Louis and Eliza D'Amico (Stanley Tucci and Hope Davis) are apparently happily married, but when he leaves their Long Island home one day for his editorial job in the city, she finds a note that suggests he may be having an affair with someone named Sandy. When she tells her mother (Anne Meara) about this, Mom insists that her husband (Pat McNamara) drive everyone into Manhattan to confront Louis and uncover the identity of Sandy. "Everyone" includes Eliza's sister, Jo (Parker Posey), and her boyfriend, Carl (Liev Schreiber), who happen to be visiting for the Thanksgiving holiday. This is not exactly your close-knit family, as it's held together loosely by the domineering mother, kept just this side of caricature by Meara's shrewdly calculated performance. The rest is a series of misadventures, as the family follows a series of clues and false leads, winding up in often hilarious but also poignant little side trips. It's the lack of go-ahead story that I think tripped up some of the movie's initial critics, like Roger Ebert, who found the movie, especially Meara's character, annoying. But there's so much about The Daytrippers that's closely observed and skillfully performed that I found myself wanting to see it again just to watch the way some brilliant performances -- Schreiber is especially wonderful in a role that's a 180 from tough guy Ray Donovan -- mesh into a true ensemble.