Review: "Landline"

Actress Jenny Slater reteams with her “Obvious Child” director/screenwriter, Gillian Robespierre, for another comedically observational look at the trials of young womanhood.

“Landline” follows a twentysomething woman played by Slater toeing the precipice of marriage and concurrent anxiety about permanency, as well as her teenage sister caught in the phase of acting out and seeking all around her for meaning, and finding only disappointment in her immediate surroundings.

It's a smart, tender, wry and sensitive portrait of a family in turmoil. Edie Falco and John Turturro play the parents, harried in their own lives and bewildered by the two independent-minded women they’ve raised. They have their own problems as well, which Robespierre explores with co-screenwriter Elisabeth Holm, who also worked on the story for “Child.”

Set in 1995, the title refers to the numerous telephone conversations in the movie, before mobile phones were ubiquitous. Most of the impact interactions take place face-to-face, however, and “Landline” also speaks to the deeper connection the sisters form throughout the course of the story when circumstances throw them into unexpected proximity.

Slate plays Dana, who superficially seems pretty stable with a decent starter job, apartment and fiancé, Ben (Jay Duplass). They get on well together, but even before the wedding vows take place a sense of sameness has crept into the relationship. The sex has even gone stale, which they attempt to solve with an unfortunate change of locale. But Dana discovers deeper cravings she’s afraid will get stifled.

This leads to a flirtation with college flame Nate (Finn Wittrock), whose crooked smile and off-kilter regard for things like marriage and family personify Dana’s increasingly chilly feet.

Abby Quinn plays Ali, who’s about 16 but seems to have skipped over the teen angst phase and hurried straight into menopausal orneriness. Her dad, Alan (Turturro), jokes that maybe getting mugged will tame her nighttime wanderings, but then takes it back: muggers would be too scared of her.

Ali is in a hurry: to grow up, to drink and do drugs, to lose her virginity, to go to college or whatever else it takes to get away from her parents as soon as possible. She has a guy she keeps around (Marquis Rodriguez) to help with her carnal explorations, but Ali treats him as an appliance to her own evolution.

One of the more interesting things about “Landline” is the way the women tend to use men poorly, rather than the other way around. Early on the girls discover love poetry written by their dad, an advertising copywriter and wannabe playwright, to a mysterious woman named “C.” They spend much of the movie trying to sniff out who that is -- not quite believing such a self-doubting person would have the gumption to cheat.

They nurse their secret resent for their dad, even as Dana carries out the exact same sort of duplicity, and Ali casually squashes her would-be boyfriend’s feelings when they intrude up on her plans.

Falco is the center of the clan as matriarch Pat, who has a very public position of power and employs a slightly softer version of that on the home front. In one scene she dismisses her husband as a “failure” in front of their daughter, and Turturro’s face is a mask of restrained pain. Pat’s not a bad person, but she’s been shouldering the parenting load for so long, she can’t help resent her floundering mate.

Things go on, with much pain as well as laughter. The appeal of “Landline” is its spot-on observation of characters who resemble real people rather than Hollywood constructs conveying themselves from Point A to B in the plot. These people knock around, sidestepping and backtracking, in a chaotic path that bends (hopefully) toward grace.

Review: "Obvious Child"

There's a new style of serio-comic storytelling centered around the disheveled lives of twentysomething New York City women. Movies like "Frances Ha" and "Obvious Child," and the HBO show "Girls," revel in the wretched squalor of their stunted careers and the hapless hopelessness of their romantic entanglements.

The fact that these tales usually feature female directors and/or writers only adds to their sense of neurotic authenticity. As is also common with young women singer/songwriters these days, they make use of their messy real lives as fodder for creativity.

I was underwhelmed by "Girls" and "Frances Ha," but "Obvious Child" is the charming best of the lot, mostly due to the vibrant presence of Jenny Slate. You may know her from being on "Saturday Night Live" for about a minute and a half, and punch-funny turns on TV shows like "Parks and Recreation."

But for most people she's a new face and voice, and my guess is it's one they'll want to see more of. She's pitiable and yet admirable, a born screw-up who we end up rooting for.

She plays Donna Stern, a not-much disguised version of her younger status as a rising stand-up comedienne. By day she works/sleeps in the tiny Unoppressive Non-Imperialist Bargain Book Store -- "it's a Manhattan institution," she insists -- and at night plows through drinks and stage sets with her fellow workaday comics.

Her shtick is embarrassingly honest appraisals of her own life, including the opening monologue where describes the spectacularly drone-like sex she has with her current boyfriend -- who happens to be in the audience, and she knows it. He promptly dumps her, and Donna quickly rebounds with an impossibly WASP-y fellow named Max (Jake Lacy) she drunkenly picks up at the bar.

If you've heard anything about "Obvious Child," it's probably in some vague terms about it being an "abortion comedy." This is true, and also not. It's accurate that Donna gets pregnant from her one night stand and speedily decides that she's not ready to be a mother. She schedules an abortion at the earliest convenience, which happens to be Valentine's Day.

Needless to say, this is not a plot designed to elicit warm feelings from the right-to-life crowd.
"You're going to kill it," her best pal Nellie (Gaby Hoffman) offers as encouragement as Donna prepares to do a set the night before the procedure. "Tomorrow I am!" she responds chirpily.

But I don't get the sense writer/director Gillian Robespierre set out to antagonize anyone, and certainly doesn't foist any lectures about 'my body, my choices.' Rather, it's an honest, funny and brave portrait of a young woman trying to navigate her way through life, and often hitting the icebergs. This is Robespierre's first feature film, based on a short movie she made a few years ago with a different cast.

Slate and Lacy have real sparks between them, a magical coupling between the loudmouthed Jewess and the uptight New Englander. They each represent something exotic to the other, and despite the strained circumstances of their situation -- she doesn't share the news with him at first -- they manage some genuine romance, or at least the modern facsimile of it.

A montage dance scene set to the Paul Simon song that gives the film its title is carefree and breathtakingly sexy, despite the fact it doesn't really show much flesh.

The film has a few other drop-in performances from more recognizable actors -- Polly Draper and Richard Kind play Donna's parents, who each love her in their own way, and David Cross turns up as a more successful comedian.

But it's Jenny Slate who gives "Obvious Child" its heart and soul, a silly but satisfying heroine for this day and age.