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Post by Mattsby on Mar 9, 2019 17:32:25 GMT
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Post by Mattsby on May 25, 2019 0:41:40 GMT
"You can stop smiling now."
Saw this last night. Pretty good - but have to agree with the reviews, it’s uneven. Jesse Eisenberg’s play feels more like an early draft; a lot of potential with the themes and situation, but I couldn’t help thinking of ways it needed editing and restructuring.
Susan Sarandon plays a tireless suburban housewife with a diva complex thanks to her storied community theater experience which has expanded her ego with grand notions of artistic relevance. She’s an aging woman who can’t stand that she’s losing her domestic audience (her mother, her husband, her daughter). It’s a role that could’ve easily been played as high camp, but Su is rather dialed back. There are a few darker, gloomy moments where she is most effective, and she has great chemistry with the show’s standout: Marin Ireland as Ljuba, her mother’s eager and devoted Serbian caretaker and increasingly necessary companion to Su. Ireland I think advances the whole show with her entertaining, funny, affecting performance. She has the hilarious fitness of a young Holly Hunter, and - as the play feels more than anything like a sitcom - she strikes that sitcom broadness in tone and timing.
Nico Santos is good too (with his infectious laugh) as Su’s flamboyant theater sidekick and chosen one for Ljuba’s green card marriage.
Eisenberg thru a suburban comedy of manners of sorts attempts to impugn the hypocrisy of America and its comfortable middle class - but the finesse isn’t there. Su’s daughter character comes into the play later on, a hyper-liberal who is also virulent and racist (making fun of Ljuba’s accent) but she doesn’t impact the play in any ironic or smart way, she’s written very unimaginatively and the performance is extreme to an egregious, distracting degree. The ending adds new ominous dimension to the Su character who becomes a stand-in for America - by extorting Ljuba, Eisenberg’s statement seems to be that immigrants are made bound, betrayed, indebted to America in order to remain - the problem is he doesn’t clear the tonal jags or sift fully thru Su’s character to justify that ending.
And a lot of the joy watching this comes from its referential nostalgia for musical theater but ultimately feels a little like deflection for Eisenberg’s attack on the practice and profession of acting, as if he wants to say: don’t take it home with you. (They use the old South Pacific soundtrack during scenic transitions but could’ve incorporated them more cleverly as the Su character’s mental abstractions.)
More on Marin Ireland: since ’08 she’s been in 18 stage productions both on and off Broadway, nearly 30 movies, and nearly 20 different TV projects. A crazy impressive work ethic. Anybody see her in anything?
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