Fonda in Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding.

Jane Fonda is always a welcome antidote to the hackneyed drivel of today’s movies, even when she’s relegated to sharing the screen with also-rans like Jennifer Lopez and Lindsay Lohan. In her career zenith, she could always be counted on to bring both complexity and nuance to the least deserving roles. At 74, she hasn’t forgotten a thing. With a wonderful, careful and admiring director, she gives even a routine picture unbridled energy, craft and an extra dash of class above and beyond the script. All reasons to embrace Bruce Beresford’s warm, polished, feel-good comedy Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding. 

Jane plays Grace, a beautiful remnant of Woodstock, an aging hippie in upstate New York who long ago surrendered the ties that bind free spirits to conventional social acceptance. She tends her kiln, barters for supplies with her art, grows chickens while holding war protests every Saturday. She’s a vigilant flower child who has given up nothing including her marijuana plants. She grows it in a specialty plant-lighted room perfect for weed. This is not autobiographical material. When the hippies were blowing in the wind, Jane was living in Paris, married to Roger Vadim. But she is a perfect Grace. Like I said before, she has forgotten nothing—including the ability to bring even a homespun character with obelisk jade earrings and macramé Feng Shui.

Culture shock looms when Grace’s successful, anal retentive Manhattan lawyer daughter Diane (Catherine Keener), in the middle of a nasty divorce, arrives in Woodstock to visit the estranged mother she hasn’t spoken to for 20 years, bringing along her two children, Jake (Nat Wolff) and Zoe (Elizabeth Olsen), who have never met their grandmother. The reunion packs an instant wallop. Diane is appalled to find her mother sleeps around at will and plays town matriarch to what’s left over from the Flower Power movement, as well as local fertility goddess and revered dope dealer. She welcomes frequent visits from naked men in the middle of the night and dances once a month around a bonfire, playing weird instruments and howling at the moon. Instead of Diane’s feared negative effect of her mother’s liberal personality on her kids, they adjust quickly and embrace their eccentric grandmother’s force of nature with relish. Diane resists her mother’s primitive lures, but the kids discover a liberating energy they didn’t know they had. In no time, vegetarian Zoe falls for a handsome butcher (Chace Crawford). Jake becomes attached to a young waitress and turns into a filmmaker. Even Diane meets a handsome, hopelessly corny, guitar-playing carpenter (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) who sings, writes songs and rekindles her lost interest in romance. While Grace reminisces about Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and threesomes with Leonard Cohen, her grandkids become enchanted with a way of life before their time. In time, they want to be just like her. Everyone learns something, in follow-the-dots movie predictability, but you like the characters so much you want them to smile and find peace in new beginnings and fresh family bonds. They bring their own hang-ups and learn to change gracefully. They all read too much Walt Whitman, and I would have liked it more if it wasn’t manipulated by so many of those old songs from the 1960s that seem so naïve and simplistic now. Still, it’s pleasant watching this uniquely cool grandmother share her pot with her uptight grandkids and encourage them to lose their virginity, presenting them with the raw material they need to look into their own souls.

Pop songs, beautiful bucolic scenery and the joy of watching Jane Fonda fizz in a fun role that looks like a no-brainer are elements that a skilled director like Australia’s polished Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy) blends with perfection. Best of all, there is Jane Fonda, whose total investment of heart and soul lights up every corner of the screen. She is so much a part of Grace that you can only wonder if placing Ronald Reagan’s autobiography next to The Cannabis Grower’s Bible wasn’t her own idea. “Maybe he’ll learn something,” says Grace. Or is it Jane Fonda talking? No matter how you slice it, she still has a lot to give, and in  Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding, she gives it all she’s got.

rreed@observer.com

PEACE, LOVE, & MISUNDERSTANDING

Running Time 96 minutes

Written by Joseph Muszynski and Christina Mengert

Directed by Bruce Beresford

Starring Jane Fonda, Catherine Keener and Elizabeth Olsen

3/4

Elizabeth Olsen, home gourmand

While it’s not particularly our forte, The Observer fasted on Monday. Mostly fasted, rather. It was a religious holiday of sorts, indeed more of a pilgrimage, for which we practiced the ancient art of self-denial. Relais & Chateaux’s Dîner des Grands Chefs was our evening’s sacrosanct destination, and we intended to arrive with a pilgrim-pure palate.

As we approached Gotham Hall’s regal colonnade, we were beginning to feel slightly faint. Swaying ever so slightly in our heels, we dashed upstairs, past the congested red carpet, for some sustenance, which, before we could object, came in the form of a flute of 1999 Cuvée Louise Pommery Champagne. We weren’t alone in our pre-sunset indulgence: after a lap around the room, we noticed 25 empty bottles of bubbly neatly (and proudly) displayed at the bar. But a few minutes later, the tally was trente-cinq. At that point, we stopped counting.
The room, a balcony above the former bank-floor at Gotham Hall, had a decidedly Parisian scent: tobacco, liberally, if not effectively, doused in floral perfume. It was heavenly.

As we walked around the space, an ever-so-slightly misplaced spotlight blinded us momentarily. Lost, sightless in this cocktail Zion! As our optic nerve relaxed, little shadows remained on our retina. Were we swimming in a black-tie vat of vintage Champagne? No, sadly not. We promptly accepted a beet-and-goat-cheese canapé to re-moor.

Among the bilingual crowd, Michael and Elyse Newhouse, Greta Gerwig, Debbie Bancroft, chef Daniel Boulud (in his double-breasted chef’s jacket) and various francophilic foodies congregated around the various bars.

We spotted model Coco Rocha from across the room, standing, statuesque, with her husband, James Conran. “I do!” Ms. Rocha exclaimed when we asked who reigned over the kitchen in their household. “I clean,” Mr. Conran admitted. “We just moved into a new house, and she’s like deathly afraid of turning the oven on. She would sacrifice me to the flame. I think she has a good life insurance policy on me,” he joked, with manifest adoration and a knowing nod in his wife’s direction. “The first thing I ever made was broiled salmon,” Ms. Rocha divulged, but admitted a deep-seated love of pierogis.

Elizabeth Olsen soon appeared wearing a floor-length dress in authoritative red. “It’s Valentino. They were really nice and let me borrow a dress for the night,” she said. The efflorescing actress confessed that she was a natural in the kitchen. “I love cooking. I’ve never taken classes,” she told The Observer. “I always make my own recipes, I never follow recipes. I’m literally collecting all the different tools in my kitchen: for every Christmas and every birthday I get a new tool, and it’s really exciting and satisfying.”

Her most recent additions? “I just got the two things I was really looking for, which was a mandolin and one of those blenders that also heats up and makes soup at the same time.”

An omnivore, Ms. Olsen professed her gastro creed. “I just think everyone needs to do everything in moderation and try a little bit of everything.” She gestured to a friend who had accompanied her for the evening. “She doesn’t eat pork because she thinks pigs are too cute.” To be sure, her friend was flush with porcine fondness. “I really want a teacup piggy. Like a 20-pounder,” she declared.

Following the already tottering crowd downstairs, The Observer felt we had been transported to some féerique woodland bower. Each table was garnished with a towering cherry blossom centerpiece, vines and ivy crawling throughout. Encircling the tables, 45 master chefs were already hard at work, preparing 15 individual menus for the eager group.

Just as we were finding our seat, we noticed Gillian Miniter at a neighboring table. Watching the chefs execute their craft, we asked Ms. Miniter if she was a capable cook herself. “You know, I have to be honest, I have not cooked in a long time, and I’ll tell you why,” she began. “I used to be a cook and I used to be into cooking, but I’m married to a man who’s not interested. So I would prepare a meal, and he would say, ‘Yeah, it was O.K., I’d rather go out.’ So, guess what, I make him a cup of tea like once a month, and it’s a big deal!” Our kind of cuisinier!

The theme of the meal was Springtime in New York, and The Observer could verily taste the seasonal motif throughout. After more champagne (bien sûr!) a lobster agrodolce was served, followed by pan-seared Maine scallops.

During a brief lull in the gastronomic action (sauciers were saucing, seafood was sautéing, and Champagne flutes were, as ever, chiming), we spoke with master chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten. We were curious to know M. Vongerichten’s thoughts on foraging, a new gastro trend in which chefs gather their ingredients from the wild. “I love it!” he said of the movement. “I was tweeting about it this weekend,” he added, producing his cellphone from the folds of his chef’s coat to show us photos of the various flora he had collected. We tried to picture the towering god of gastronomy, back stooped, picking through shrubbery, but our imagination failed.

As we found our seat, veal filet with bitter caramel and endive tatin were being served. The evening was topped off with a selection of fine American cheese, chocolate mousse and a glass of Porto Rozès from 1947.
Profoundly satiated, The Observer finished our last heavenly glass of Champagne (the port lacked that divine pneumatic sparkle) and bid au revoir to our tablemates. Turning around just before we left the space, we couldn’t help but smile as waiters returned to fill the flutes of guests requiring one final dram of the golden draught.

This, and nothing else, is love, we thought as we walked out into the balmy night.

Fresh from her surprise triumph in Martha Marcy May Marlene, Elizabeth Olsen plays a skittish lass named Sarah who accompanies her father (Adam Trese) and her Uncle Peter (Eric Sheffer Stevens) to a dark, deserted summer house on the edge of a lake where the two boys played when they were young. Her job: to pack up the decaying contents of the old abandoned family home in the middle of the woods for resale. Mold cakes the walls. Cell phones don’t work. All they have to light the darkness is lantern-shape flashlights. Then the spooky noises begin. The doors lock, and there’s no way out. The first of many challenges to logic: why do they begin packing up the boxes in the dark? Why don’t they come back the next day, when the sun is shining and they can see what they’re doing? The questions are just beginning.

For the first half hour of a movie so slow it seems to be fueled by liquid Valium, there are only the sounds—footsteps, creaking door hinges, punctuated by Ms. Olsen’s screams. Like The Haunting, the goose bumps come from what is heard and implied—not what is shown or described. The father keeps disappearing, ending up in a pool of blood. The uncle runs away, only to return and get knocked out with a brain concussion. The claustrophobic setting—dark rooms littered with clutter—has a deleterious effect on Ms. Olsen that is the only thing in the movie that makes any sense. Shot mostly in annoying close-ups, the blurry camerawork from drunken hand-held video cams doesn’t add chills. It only causes night blindness. Eventually, the only light is from the flash bulbs in a Polaroid camera. The three characters (and one hallucination) in Silent House lack even the most fundamental pretense to characterization, but it is clear that the two men are up to no good and Ms. Olsen is more (or less) than what she appears to be. Who is she and where has she been for so long that her father and uncle don’t seem to know her? No spoilers, but she seems mad from the start, and it’s apparent that she’s an expert with a shotgun for reasons that have nothing to do with finishing school.

The movie’s one claim to self-importance is its claim to be shot in real time, in one take, but you couldn’t prove it to me. Mainly, it’s another tour de force performance by Ms. Olsen with a maximum display of eye-rolling hysteria, a bare minimum of dialogue and no visible help from a director with any ability to prolong suspense. You can’t condemn Silent House for even being contrived. A contrived plot heads in different directions, no matter how obvious. Like a turtle with a missing toe, this one is incapable of going anywhere, so it never moves at all.

rreed@observer.com

SILENT HOUSE

Running Time 85 minutes

Written by Gustavo Hernández (based on the film by) and Laura Lau (screenplay)

Directed by Chris Kentis and Laura Lau

Starring Elizabeth Olsen, Adam Trese and Eric Sheffer Stevens

Since 1995, Vanity Fair has released an annual gatefold cover spotlighting hot new stars (with occasional breaks for covers featuring "legends" or Barack Obama). This is a risky game: the 1995 cover featured Nicole Kidman, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Julianne Moore, while the 2000 cover included Wes Bentley and Chris Klein.

This year's cover, released this morning, includes 11 stars lounging in a vaguely boudoir-ish setting; many of them were not especially recognizable to begin with (that's rather the point), but they're made up to look even less so! Herewith, a forecasting of the futures of these bright young stars (some of whom we've seen on this cover in past years), measured by stars featured on past Hollywood Issue covers.

Rooney Mara (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo):

Best-case scenario: Natalie Portman

Worst-case scenario: Noomi Rapace

Jennifer Lawrence (The Hunger Games):

Best-case scenario: Jennifer Lawrence (The Hunger Games)

Worst-case scenario: Jennifer Lawrence (The Beaver)

Mia Wasikowska (Jane Eyre):

Best-case scenario: Mia Wasikowska (Jane Eyre)

Worst-case scenario: Mia Wasikowska (Albert Nobbs)

Jessica Chastain (The Help, etc.):

Best-case scenario: Julianne Moore

Worst-case scenario: Claire Forlani

Elizabeth Olsen (Martha Marcy May Marlene):

Best-case scenario: Carey Mulligan

Worst-case scenario: Alison Lohman

Adepero Oduye (Pariah)

Best-case scenario: Angela Bassett

Worst-case scenario: Rosario Dawson

Shailene Woodley (The Descendants)

Best-case scenario: Emma Stone

Worst-case scenario: Selma Blair

Paula Patton (Mission: Impossible--Ghost Protocol)

Best-case scenario: Salma Hayek

Worst-case scenario: Jessica Biel

Felicity Jones (Like Crazy)

Best-case scenario: Cate Blanchett

Worst-case scenario: Minnie Driver

Lily Collins (Mirror, Mirror)

Best-case scenario: Kate Hudson

Worst-case scenario: Monica Potter

Brit Marling (Another Earth)

Best-case scenario: Chloe Sevigny

Worst-case scenario: Leelee Sobieski

An Olsen sandwich!

It was only a couple years ago that the Olsen twins were as ubiquitous as Lindsay Lohan and Kim Kardashian combined. But time has either been fair or unfair to Mary-Kate and Ashley (depending on your view of fame vs. the relative hassle of paparazzi stalking), and as of late its their younger sister Elizabeth who has been getting all the attention for her groundbreaking performance in Martha Marcy May Marlene.

We're not saying this spotlight swivel would make New York's most infamous set of celebutante twins mad...but you know that none of their work in film has ever been called "shattering." (Despite the fact that one of the Ms. Olsens made out with Ben Kingsley in The Wackness.) So what have the twosome been doing to put their name back on their radar?

Going round the NYC party circuit, for deffies, like attending last night's cocktail party thrown by (for?) Christian Louboutin at Barney's. We must remember: these girls, like Ms. Kardashian, are entrepreneurs first...last we checked, their combined worth was in the billions (and that's not for their acting prowess). Their $39,000 alligator backpacks were flying off the shelves during Fashion Week, because who doesn't need an alligator backpack?

And apparently it was Mary-Kate, not Ashley who Saturday Night Live comedian Jason Sudeikis has been seeing lately. That makes sense: Mr. Sudeikis' last girlfriend was January Jones, another party-hopping, icy blonde. (Everyone knows MK is the crazier of the twins.) Ashley's love life is a little more speculative, but there's a chance she's trying to nab a certified geek, as evidenced by her and Mary-Kate's Halloween ad for a social-networking site featuring light sabers and storm trooper helmets. Sexy!

Martha Marcy May Marlene

Creepy and serenely suspenseful, Martha Marcy May Marlene is a riveting study in what it’s like to escape from a physically, psychologically abusive cult, and how hard it is to return to normal life after being brainwashed. Despite a slow pace that intercuts the peaceful present with terrifying, often confusing flashbacks, and an ambiguous ending for the art-house crowd, this is a movie that haunts and resonates.

First time writer-director Sean Durkin has made a festival circuit splash with this odd, graceful film, and the centerpiece is a career-defining performance by Elizabeth Olsen, the younger of the Olsen Twins (whatever that is), that is transcendent. She wanders aimlessly out of a crude country cabin in the Catskills one morning and staggers blankly into a village to find a pay phone. She dials. The woman who answers is her estranged sister Lucy, who hasn’t seen her for two years. Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and her new husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) invite her to their house in Connecticut and spend the next three weeks trying in vain to unravel clues to where Martha has been, and Martha, who has assumed all of the other names in the title, spends her time trying to shake the rules and covenants of what was drilled into her head, revealing nothing of her mysterious past. The film cuts back and forth between Martha’s unsettling experiences on the commune, and her new life on the outside where her disruptive presence and weird behavior (climbing into her sister and brother-in-law’s bed while they’re making love, leaping naked into the lake, insulting the bartender at their barbecue) wrecks their privacy and rattles their nerves. Ted thinks she’s insane. Martha grows more delusional and paranoid daily. Slowly, we learn why. At first, life on the commune seemed unconventional, loving and spiritual. Then the charismatic cult leader and Charles Manson clone (John Hawkes, from Winter’s Bone) taught his followers to fire guns, break into houses, and commit violent murders. The principles he lived by were “Death is the most beautiful part of life” and “Fear is nirvana”. Escape became inevitable. Still resisting conventional behavior, but doubly vulnerable, she sinks deeper into the growing menace of the cult and its grip on her mind. The film finally grows to a dark and shadowy finale that is open to many interpretations, but director Durkin is always in control of his material, exploring the demented clash between twisted logic and ideology gone haywire without the lurid details. The pastoral environment around the cult that seems luminous is juxtaposed with the price Martha paid for her need to belong (hard labor in the fields, group sex, continual rape by the cult leader). Mr. Durkin admirably achieves a misty reality without preaching. He seems less interested in the sexual and religious alchemy of cult life than in the causes of one woman’s self-deluded descent into degenerative psychosis. Ms. Olsen, a revelation throughout, feeds every scene with poignancy. It’s an alarming but gratifying achievement.

rreed@observer.com

MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE

Running Time 120 mins

Written by Sean Durkin

Directed by Sean Durkin

Starring Elizabeth Olsen, Sarah Paulson, John Hawkes

3/4

Housewife de Lesseps.

Don’t let the warm weather fool you, we are officially in Fall season mode. You can always tell the changing of the seasons by the changing of the leaves, or at least by the changing of the hair colors of The Real Housewives of New York—which we anticipate will take place any day now in some of the city’s higher end hair care establishments as LuAnn de Lesseps and Ramona Singer reap the rewards of their cast-off cast members by doubling their salary. The two will now be getting $500,000 each to throw champagne in each other’s faces. Who says that there are no high-paying jobs anymore? Rather unbelievably, fellow New Yorkers, these are the 1%.

Meanwhile, the Occupy Wall Street protesters, who are some heretofore undetermined percentage of the remaining 99%, have moved on to their fourth consecutive week in the hospitable lodgings of Zuccotti Park. Mayor Bloomberg changed his tune about the city’s newest attraction, saying that the protesters were welcome to stay in the park as long as they liked. (Which, he’s hoping, will not extend past November’s first frost.)

The cooling temperature could also be a good excuse for city-dweller Beyonce, whose baby-bump seemingly collapsed during an interview with an Australian TV show this week, fueling speculation that she was just using the padding... as insulation for her real baby, due in February! It was an embarrassing faux-pas for the Harper’s Bazaar cover celeb, who spent her profile in this month’s glossy talking about her pregnancy. The reception was, shall we say, icy.

Other places where the chill factor drops to below zero? The New York Times, where a memo circulated reminding staffers to report any speaking engagements where they received more than $5,000. We’re still trying to guess the blind item on who failed to ask “pretty please,” but if we had to take a guess, we’re going with Jill Abramson pocketing extra scratch by talking up cute puppies during a secret Westminster semi-final event. Perhaps she could join up with New Yorker’s Susan Orlean, who held her book party for Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend at The Kennel Club.

And really, is there a quicker route to fame and fortune than writing a book about dogs? Sure: just be the perkiest thing at 4:30 in the morning (without the use of recreational stimulants). We assume that’s the reason that NY1’s traffic reporter Jamie Shupak was profiled in The New York Times this weekend under the title “A Star Is Born.” We have nothing against Ms. Shupak, who we recently named one of New York Media’s most eligible bachelorettes, but the bar for stardom must have dropped a bit closer to sea level if you can reach it now by reporting construction delays on the BQE. (That or Times headline writers have been using recreational stimulants.)

Then again, we’re not sure where the stardom bar is anymore anyway. Elizabeth Olsen, who took a break from NYU classes to premiere her breakout feature, Martha Marcy May Marlene, at the New Yorker Film Festival, seems to be eclipsing both of her famous twin sisters. The bar there, for thespianism at least, is somewhere in the Dead Sea basin range, but the Other Olson seems to doing well critically. You never know what Autumn will bring.