In the Land of Women: Nice Stroll
November 10th 2007 01:30
Adam Brody and Meg Ryan walking In The Land Of Women
I caught this movie on a fluke and I expected I wouldn't think much of it. It is more or less similar to Elizabethtown, a movie I hated. In the end, it came as a pleasant surprise and I liked it much better than I'd initally hoped.
It's the story of Carter, played by Adam Brody, who is a screenwriter in LA. Carter is dumped by his girlfriend and so to get a break, he travels to Michigan, where his cantankerous grandmom lives expecting to die any moment. There in Michigan, Carter gets drawn into the lives of Sarah who lives across the street and her family. Sarah's daughter Lucy is in a rebellious teenager mode, her husband is said to be having an affair unknown to her and she finds she has breast cancer. It all starts when Carter and Sarah begin to take walks and Sarah suggest that Carter take Lucy and her other daughter to movies.
Lucy has her own teenage love problems and she is totally unsympathetic to her mom's plight. She know her dad is having an affair but still can't muster sympathy for her mom. The movie doesn't really make clear why Lucy began thinking like this. (Sarah is a bit uptight but not really bad and the girl who played Lucy can't really act.)
Sarah on the other hand goes through a very understandable panic when she finds out she has breast cancer. The movie hints that Carter was attracted to Sarah even as a boy and during their walks together that attraction does get out into open. It quickly clashes with Lucy's need to find in Carter a way out of her teenage anxieties.
The writers don't really cash on in the dramatic tensions inherent in the plot and everything is minimised and quickly resolved without lending anything much weight and everything is pared down to the level of park strolls that are the movie's basic premise. Still, it does make you care for the Carter and Sarah and that maybe because of Adam Brody and Meg Ryan who play these characters. Meg Ryan is luminously beautiful even when her character takes a hard turn and Adam Brody is an almost thespian. It is he who brings the movie together. When Lucy admits to him that she is not sympathetic toher mother's plight even though she knows her father is having an affair, he says to her nonchalantly ,"Do you think it's fair to her?" It is the quality of compartmentalised attention inherent in that nonchalant rebuke that woke me up and take notice. After all, a few minutes ago he was the confidante of the mother.
Adam is gangly and looks like an awkward teenager himself but as you go on you realise that he is quite mature and capable and that's the quality that's drawing the women around him like moths to light. He is not an adolescent that's growing into adulthood but an adult who hasn't figured out why he doesn't have the fully grownup life he craves for.
The movie ends without major crises. Lucy finds a boyfriend and Sarah does get out of her cancer, though we are left wondering about her wandering husband. The movie ends up with Carter chatting up an engaging waitress, a sign of hope he'll find other women and quickly, even though he is out of the lives of these two.
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