I Wanted to See the Poetry-Reading Vegan:
Enough Said
(2014)
Yes, it’s a romantic comedy; and yes, I loved it. I’m beginning to hate that term ‘chick flick’. You know, we male horror movie buffs can enjoy a good romance as well. At least they should be able to if they want to be rounded individuals. Otherwise they turn into those peculiar guys with no social skills that we sometimes avoid at conventions.
So yes, I loved Enough Said. That’s not strange. What is strange is that the late James Gandolfini is the lead male romantic role. Now there’s something that I didn’t think I’d be writing. And it’s not like the audience is expecting him to suddenly do a Tony Soprano on someone. I guess it shows you what a fine actor he was when you forget about that and become immersed in his character from the beginning. That character, by the way, has a pretty wonderful job:
“I make sure that [old TV shows] are transferred to digital properly. I make sure they’re logged in properly. I write little blurbs so that if anyone under 50 ever wants to put down their phone and come in here and find something original and brilliant, they can find what they’re looking for.”
In fact, I found myself rooting for all the characters, the main one being Julia Louis-Dreyfus. You know, I remember this very attractive actress from Seinfeld but I had no idea that she had such a wonderful name. Roll that one around on your tongue for a while.
She plays Eva, a divorced masseuse with a daughter almost set for college, who is pretty much wandering through her life reasonably contented, when she meets Albert (Gandolfini). They hit it right off– and such is the chemistry between the actors that for the first forty minutes I didn’t think that I would be bothering to write about this. Nothing much happens except that they get along; and I liked them so much that I would have happily eavesdropped on their conversation and the fun they were having for the remainder of the movie. But, a movie it is, and so we need a little bit of tension thrown in. This comes initially in the form of Albert’s daughter; and then…well, if you are going to be charmed in the cinema for a tidy hour-and-a-half I’ll let you find out for yourself.
There’s a lot of stuff which I could relate to on relationships between middle-aged people. At one point Eva is musing: “Our middle-agedness is comforting and sexy to me. Isn’t that so incredibly sad—but sort of good, too.”
I don’t know writer/director Nicole Holofcener’s work at all, just that she has done some episodes of Sex and the City, but she is very assured here. And there are also two actresses whose names I always want to type the word ‘wonderful’ in front of: Catherine Keeler and Toni Collette. As to Keeler, she mentions meeting a guy who is a poetry-reading vegan. I’d like to have seen that developed a bit more.
Now there’s something that would make up for the lack of horror elements in Enough Said: a mutant aberration known as a poetry-reading vegan.
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