Modern Love (2019)
REVIEW BY: ROBERT CHANDLER
Somebody tweeted last week that he wasn't interested in Noah Baumbach's new film, MARRIAGE STORY, because, he asked, how many more stories of affluent New Yorker relationships do we need? Well, quite. New York used to be grungy and ghettoed, dangerous... think DEATH WISH, THE WARRIORS, MEAN STREETS and TAXI DRIVER in the mid-70s, but then Woody Allen came along and gentrified the place with ANNIE HALL, MANHATTAN and the autumnal HANNAH & HER SISTERS, with its ee cummings meet-cute. New York on film changed. Even Scorsese, once he achieved success, turned away from the scuzzy small-time hoodlums with whom he grew up and moved in with a couple of bohemian (ie wealthy) NY loft artists, Linda Fiorentino in AFTER HOURS and Nick Nolte in NEW YORK STORIES. And who could blame him?
New York Relationship Movies are always about people with books. There are books everywhere. Often an author is the protagonist. Bookshelves feature as part of the essential decor; as do friendly, homespun, Utopian Little Bookshops where well-dressed book people gather and say intelligent things to each other. If you love books or at least pretend to, then the New York Relationship Movie is for you.
Amazon Prime is carrying a new series of 30' films, MODERN LOVE, where each film is a New York Relationship Movie. So far, the first two films have featured Bookish People. Which is not to say they are uninteresting because they have been rather good. Their secret weapon is John Carney, the series' principal writer and director. Carney wrote/directed ONCE, SING STREET, and BEGIN AGAIN (maligned but I love it.) He knows how to write for people. He "gets" love and relationships.
The MODERN LOVE series is based on a regular column in The New York Times; all episodes are supposedly based on true stories and have attracted a great cast. The first episode, WHEN THE DOORMAN IS YOUR MAIN MAN, worked perfectly. A young woman (a writer/editor) has a series of relationships with men but they have to pass muster by the doorman of her affluent apartment block. The doorman is a friend and surrogate father to the woman. He could be creepy but isn't. Cristin Milioti as the writer/editor (she reads a book a day) is excellent. Gaz Coombes' lovely song The Girl Who Fell To Earth features. The film made me laugh and cry, and I ask what more could you want from half an hour?
WHEN CUPID IS A PRYING JOURNALIST worked less well as it attempted to combine two relationship stories and have each comment on the other. A noble attempt that might have benefited from an hour to tell its tale. It featured Dev Patel, Andy Garcia, and Catherine Keener, who lifts everything she is in. Keener plays a photographer who has published a book and goes on a book-signing tour whereupon, in a lovely Utopian Little Bookshop, she meets an old flame, whose number she had written in his copy of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.
The film next up, TAKE ME AS I AM, WHOEVER I AM, features Anne Hathaway as a woman with bi-polar disorder, and there are others to come starring Andrew Scott, Tina Fey, Sofia Boutella. Also up ahead is SO HE LOOKED LIKE DAD, IT'S ONLY DINNER, RIGHT?, which may be the one to which I am most looking forward because it stars a "supporting actor" who is always excellent... Shea Wigham.