Here is a quite unbearable curation of first-world problems starring Amy Adams from screenwriter Kata Wéber and her husband, director Kornél Mundruczó. They are film-makers who have given us challenging and interesting material in the past; now they pivot to a solemn, narcissistic tale, couched in self-forgiving, self-adoring rhetoric, all about upper-middle-class artistic folk in the US, yearning for wellness and recovery in their lovely Cape Cod home. It’s a movie which invites its audience to believe in the alleged talent and importance of its artistic characters, and also extend submissive empathy to their inter-generational psychic wounds.
Adams plays Laura, the grownup daughter of a supposedly brilliant dance company director, now dead and remembered in epiphanic childhood memory-glimpses, a genius who had close-cropped grey hair, a black polo neck and functioning alcoholism. Laura inherited his dance passion and his boozing, and now runs his world-renowned company with an uncertain hand; she has just returned from rehab after drunk-driving and crashing while her young son Felix (Redding Munsell) was in the car. Thank heavens they weren’t hurt! You can spend the entire film expecting a flashback to this dramatic event which might show Laura in a bad light – or an interesting one. But no.
