by Julian Wood
Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Oliva Colman, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kate McKinnon, Andy Samberg, Sunita Manim, Zoe Chao, Allison Janney
Intro:
... very funny and the small observations yield a steady stream of chuckles that makes you largely look past the film’s flaws.
A successful, even envied middle class couple, have a marriage that is not just fraying but about to fully meltdown. Ivy (Olivia Colman) is a feted chef, Theo (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a trendy airy-fairy architect. They have two kids, which she is almost too busy to parent and which he seems bent on shaping into sports obsessives.
The film gives us a sense of the state of play early on when we see the couple in a marriage guidance session. This also sets the tone for the approach taken by director Jay Roach (Austin Powers, Meet the Parents).
The couple exchange barbed zingers, which they relish, but which deliberately overwhelm any possibility of reasoned dialogue. Herein lies one of the main problems that the film has to overcome; we have to actually engage with these characters as believable people and not just as (albeit consummate) actors delivering finely-tuned lines, courtesy of screenwriter (Australia’s own) Tony McNamara (The Favourite, Poor Things, The Great), here adapting the novel by Warren Adler (also the source of the 1989 hit film War of the Roses starring Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas).
The pairing of Colman and Cumberbatch is itself an unusual choice. She can obviously do comedy (she was a strong character in the brilliant British comedy Peep Show for example). He is more your classic thespian who usually tackles roles that require lots of inner depth and soul searching. Here, he has to be light and acerbic, which he can do of course, but that doesn’t make it good casting.
The film doesn’t declare a sense of place particularly coherently. Ivy’s seaside restaurant seems to be in an English coastal town but everyone around them seems to be American. Later, Ivy jets around and becomes global, but basically the film splashes down somewhere mid-Atlantic. It tries to work this to its advantage by contrasting the politeness of the couple’s American friends with the coldly-delivered but utterly obscene dialogue of the Brits. There is frisson in watching the slightly posh Colman dropping the C word with such vehemence (along with knowing that Disney are releasing the film).
To be fair, the film doesn’t just rely on either shock value or slapstick, though it has bits of both. The script is polished and there are plenty of ripe exchanges. Some of these are very funny and the small observations yield a steady stream of chuckles that makes you largely look past the film’s flaws. Audiences are bound to find more than incidental pleasures here thanks largely to the skill of the leads. Be warned though, this is not a date movie; unless you are very secure in your relationship and absolutely certain that you and your partner share exactly the same sense of humour.
