Review: "Peace, Love & Misunderstanding"

"Peace, Love & Misunderstanding" is one of those movies where you genuinely enjoy hanging out with the characters, but the story unfolds with all the surprises of the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. As time goes on, you find yourself liking the people you're watching less and less because you know what they're going to do long before they get around to doing it.

For a movie that professes to teach us to get past our insecurities and think more freely, it does so with astonishingly conventional storytelling tropes.

This dramedy is set in the town of Woodstock, which because of the eponymous concert holds mythic status among that portion of the Baby Boom generation that never grew up, and their fresher disciples.

Jane Fonda plays Grace, a sort of queen mother of the hippies, who eschews possessions but owns a magnificent piece of idyllic farm property outside of town. She grows (and smokes) a lot of pot, paints portraits of landscapes both geographical and anatomical, howls at the moon with fellow aging females, protests wars (any will do), bangs drums and pretty much every other stereotype of crunchy Earth Motherhood you can think of.

Her character is actually not the protagonist, but rather the flighty nexus around which other characters and their stories orbit.

Grace's daughter Diane (Catherine Keener), who supposedly was born at Woodstock, has rebelled against her mother's rebellion by becoming a conservative, uptight lawyer who hasn't seen her mother in 20 years. But Diane's own life is crumbling around her, with her husband (Kyle MacLachlan) curtly announcing one day that he wants a divorce.

She decides to trundle up her two teenage kids and head to mother's to ... well, apparently to form the basis of a screenplay. (Certainly no other logic applies. Who, in a time of extreme emotional duress, seeks to pile on more conflict?)

 Jake (Nat Wolff), still in high school, thinks life is a film, and he wants to be the director -- mainly because it allows him to shoot video of everyone instead of interacting with them. (He bristles when people call him a budding Spielberg, preferring to be associated with the more iconoclastic Werner Herzog.) Jake is painfully shy around girls, until he meets the winsome Tara (Marissa O'Donnell) at one of his grandmother's protests.

Zoe is the older child, already a student at Columbia, who has continued the rebellion streak in her family by becoming a vegetarian, peace-loving poetry lover. (In one of the movie's funnier bits, Jake complains that Zoe once had her Barbie dolls hold a war crimes tribunal for his G.I. Joes, and beheaded them.)

Zoe is more like her mother than she'd care to admit, presenting herself as open-minded but really rather dismissive of anyone who doesn't share her views. That includes Cole (Chance Crawford), the cute guy who works in a butcher shop (at least it's organic), smokes tobacco but not marijuana ("I like reality," he explains) and even hunts animals recreationally. Their relationship has a proverbial, almost slapsticky I-hate-you-until-the-moment-I-realize-I-love-you flavor.

Since both kiddies have exchanges of goo-goo eyes with a townie, Diane isn't about to be left out. Her match is Jude (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a songwriter/carpenter who takes her skinny-dipping, beckons her onstage to sing at a concert and tells her she needs to untie the balloon of her spirit from the sandbag of her inhibitions, or something.

(Somehow, I suspect this pitch would seem less dreamy if it were coming from a potbellied guy with rotten teeth instead of a handsomely grizzled Jeffrey Dean Morgan.)

Director Bruce Beresford shot his first short movie in the 1950s, and has made some gems along the way ("Tender Mercies," "Driving Miss Daisy"). He has a nice, light touch with his actors, and helps lend a sense that the characters are more fully drawn than they really are.

Screenwriters Christina Mengert and Joseph Muszynski, though, have a tendency to build their writing around individual scenes and particular lines of dialogue rather than develop a coherent whole. As a result, the “Peace, Love & Misunderstanding” registers as a collection of Important Moments rather than a fully realized story.

2.5 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "Driving Miss Daisy" (1989)

Although it hasn't aged particularly well since winning the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1989, "Driving Miss Daisy" is an exquisitely-acted slice of cinematic comfort food that evokes the look and feel of the Old South -- or, at least, how we would like to remember it.

Looking back on this film directed by Bruce Beresford from a screenplay by Alfred Uhry, based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, it feels a little quaint and musty -- like a room in your grandmother's well-tended house that seemed magical when you were little, but upon reaching adulthood seems cramped and a little stale-smelling.

Still, it's mostly a showcase for two finely-written characters, and the actors who portray them. That's how "Driving Miss Daisy" registers now: Marking the coda of one great acting career, and the rise of another.

Jessica Tandy made her bones on the stage, but had many memorable film appearances beginning in 1932, including "The Seventh Cross" and "The Birds." Already in her 70s, she stepped into a major career revival in the 1980s and '90s with "The World According to Garp" and "Cocoon" and its sequel, capped off by her Oscar win for Best Actress for "Miss Daisy," becoming the oldest actress (at 81) to win the statuette. She would be nominated again a couple years later for "Fried Green Tomatoes," and died in 1994.

"Driving Miss Daisy," along with "Glory" that same year, vaulted Morgan Freeman into stardom at the age of 52, beginning a 20-year run of screen roles that is, in my estimation, unmatched by any other actor in the modern era. "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves." "Unforgiven." "The Shawshank Redemption." "Se7en." "Kiss the Girls."  "Amistad." "Deep Impact" (portraying a black American president). "Bruce Almighty" (playing God, no less). "Million Dollar Baby." "Batman Begins" and "The Dark Knight." "Gone Baby Gone." "Invictus."

Five Oscar nominations, and one win. Amazing. Only Tom Hanks' run in the 1990s is even worthy of comparison.

Even when "Miss Daisy" came out more than 20 years ago, many people were critical of it because of its portrayal of a deferential black man playing servant to an rich, elderly white woman. All of the "Yes'ms" and "Yessirs" coming out of Hoke Colburn's mouth grated on the ears of a younger, more assertive generation of African-Americans -- especially filmmaker Spike Lee, who still speaks ill of "Miss Daisy" winning Best Picture when his film of the same year, "Do the Right Thing," did not even garner a nomination.

(Lee is correct in his assessment that "Right Thing" is the superior film, but doesn't seem to realize how much his harping diminishes him.)

Daisy Werthan is a member of a small community of Atlanta Jews prominent during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She is wealthy but denies it -- in fact, her main objection to her son Boolie (Dan Aykroyd) hiring a driver for her after she crashes her Chrysler is that her friends will think she's putting on airs. She's furious when Hoke picks her up right in front of the synagogue after services, "like the queen of Romania."

Their relationship progresses with an unsurprising but still genuine thawing period. Daisy teaches the illiterate Hoke to read, he helps her in the garden, and eventually learns to stand up for himself. "Hoke, you're my best friend" is her declaration after 25 years together, and its utterance surprises her as much as it does Hoke.

As a confirmed classic car nut, the automobiles in the movie were a gorgeous feast for these eyes. I could barely stand to see Miss Daisy crash her brand-new Chrysler, but was rewarded by its replacement with a maroon 1948 Hudson Commodore. That gave way to a black 1955 Cadillac Fleetwood 75, and Miss Daisy stayed in Caddies from there on in -- a 1965 and 1972, I believe.

3.5 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "Tender Mercies"

With the release today of "Crazy Heart," it got me to thinking about the 1983 classic "Tender Mercies," starring Robert Duvall in a film with very similar themes. Duvall plays Mac Sledge, a once-legendary country singer who has disappeared off the face of the globe in a trail of booze and debauchery.

Mac and Jeffrey Bridges' Bad Blake from "Crazy Heart" both were once big-time stars, but are now out in the music business wilderness. Well, Blake at least was still playing in bowling alleys and two-bit honkey-tonks. When we first meet Mac, he's coming off a bender at a tiny Texas motel/gas station. He apparently was traveling with a friend who left him high and dry, with just his old trailer to call his own.

I loved the plain language of the Horton Foote screenplay. Mac simply goes to the woman running the motel and says, "Lady, I'm broke. I'll be happy to work off what I owe you." The woman is Rosa Lee, a young Vietnam war widow with a small son, and she will become Mac's salvation.

Foote -- who gave Duvall his start in movies by pushing for him to be cast as Boo Radley in "To Kill a Mockingbird" 20 years earlier -- won an Academy Award for best original screenplay, to go with the gold statuette Duvall took home for Best Actor.

The time compression of the first 15 minutes or so of the film is amazing. In just a few quick edits, director Bruce Beresford lets us know that Mac stayed on as a hired hand, fell in love with Rosa Lee, gave up drinking, married Rosa Lee and bonded with Sonny, her boy. And yet this quick transition doesn't seem hurried or arbitrary.

Mac used to be one-half of country music royalty with his ex-wife Dixie Scott (Betty Buckley), whom he once tried to kill during one of his alcoholic binges. At one point Mac goes to see her perform in nearby Austin -- he wrote most of her songs himself -- and they have a short but bitter exchange in which she warns him not to attempt to see their daughter, Sue Anne (Ellen Barkin, age 29 and playing 18).

Mac gives a new song he has written to Dixie's manager, played by Wilford Brimley, but he returns it to him a few days later, saying it's no good because the country music game has changed. Mac is so enraged, he drives off in a huff, intending to get drunk, but he pours out the bottle he bought and returns to Rosa Lee.

A newspaper reporter turns up to write a story about Mac, but he refuses to answer questions. The story comes out anyway, mostly Dixie's tales of his terrible treatment of her, which generates some notoriety in the sleepy little town. The film's critical exchange comes when Mac is coming out of a feed store, and a woman asks him, "Were you really Mac Sledge?" He says, "Yes ma'am, I guess I was."

A young band turns up on Mac's doorstep looking for inspiration, and he eventually agrees to record the song he wrote for Dixie with them. Just when the record comes out and Rosa Lee tunes the song on the truck radio, Mac reaches his hand in and snaps it off. He has just received word that his daughter, who ran off with a much older man, has died in an accident.

This leads to perhaps the most important scene in the movie, with Mac tending a small garden he has planted across the street from the motel. Beresford shoots naturalistically, almost documentary style, in long shot with a long take with no cuts or close-ups. You can't even see Duvall's face underneath his wide-brimmed hat in the slanting sun. But the pain and power of the scene just spill out over that spare Texas landscape. "I don't trust happiness; never have, never will," Mac confesses.

Like Bridges, Duvall did all his own singing for the film, and even wrote two songs. When I first heard him, I told myself that couldn't be Duvall -- it sounded exactly like an old-school country singer, with a deep, baleful tone. Duvall reportedly spent weeks driving around Texas, listening to accents and small-town bands to get his sound just right.

I have to say that after seeing "Tender Mercies," "Crazy Heart" diminishes just a little bit in my eyes. Many of the themes of redemption and regret seem clearly inspired by the earlier film.

3.5 stars