Everidge and Murney in Falling.

Graceful writing, great acting, exquisite direction, suspense, profound subject matter—you rarely find even one of those elements in a contemporary play opening in commercial New York theater, and never all in the same play at the same time. That’s what makes Falling such a shock. It teaches you something and leaves you sated—and it rocks. 

For 75 minutes without intermission, this play about the profound effects of an autistic child on a long-suffering family packs a huge emotional punch in the brief time it’s been allotted down at the Minetta Lane Theatre Off Broadway. Deanna Jent, the author, has based it on her own family. And Lori Adams, the director, has wrenched every ounce of juice from its reservoir of emotions, like water from a dish towel. From the minute the main character enters, a humongous shadow of toxic danger looms in the rooms of the Martin family, sucking the oxygen out of the air. This would be Josh, an autistic 18-year-old who has already lived longer than anyone predicted. Josh is played with electrifying force by an actor from San Antonio, Texas, named Daniel Everidge. Gigantic and overweight, his limbs never hit the spot where they ought to be and his tongue has a mind of its own. Walking around in circles, tracing invisible objects with his fingers, fixated on phrases (“No school—school is stuck, no school—school is stuck!”) that never end, his head protruding from his neck like a stork’s, Mr. Everidge does not lead you into the darkness of his mental disorder with soft gloves. He kicks you out of your senses. From the minute he sails onstage, terrifying his parents and sending his sister fleeing from the room, I thought, “What a shame this remarkable talent will never work again—there are so few roles for autistic actors.” Mr. Everidge is mind-bogglingly believable.

The rest of the cast that revolves around him is equally fine in less showy roles. Julia Murney takes a detour from her usual musical comedy gigs to play his mother—a woman who sacrificed a normal life when Josh was born, preferring to care for him at home, away from judgmental critics and frightened onlookers. Sometimes, in an unusual moment of privacy, she sings along with rock tunes, indulging her fantasy of being a pop star—a dream she abandoned long ago. Daniel Pearce is the battered father, wrestling with the burden of putting his son in a group home. Jacey Powers is the sister, whose own needs fall on deaf ears. Celia Howard is the visiting grandmother, sheltered from the truth because she lives so far away, but suddenly slammed into reality when her grandson repeatedly pulls a string attached to a box on an upper shelf that empties a pile of feathers on his head, screeching with mad glee. Strapped into a child-restraint device that circles his body like a backpack, Josh further leaves the family aghast when he reaches inside his clothes to twist his nipples or masturbate.

Yes! This soul-rending play—from what I know about families living with autism, Down syndrome and other mental challenges (more than you know)—is the first time so much medical and psychological research has been expounded onstage. Ms. Jent, who appeared the night I saw the play and participated in a post-performance Q&A, gets the agonizing facts right. It’s a way to keep from falling into a pit of sadness and self-pity from which there is no escape. It’s a really hard play to watch, especially when Josh turns violent and almost kills the parents. But you do learn things. Thanks for sharing.

You learn how unselfishness can lead to self-destruction when years of trial and error never pay off. Every family activity is disrupted, personal belongings are wrecked, a simple family meal together in peace takes on the nerve-jangling tension of a bleak melodrama because the sight of people eating food grosses Josh out. Worse still, a lifetime of Josh’s presence has left everyone questioning his or her own sanity. Living with the threat of potential carnage has turned their existence into an empty landscape. What’s the alternative? Institutions for autistic people are unsafe, and there are long waiting lists to get in. Social workers and home care providers run in the opposite direction. The sister, robbed of her own voice, tries to conceal how much she hates and resents her brother, but finally blurts “I just wish he would go away forever!” The mother elects to keep her Gethsemane at home no matter how much it means she neglects everyone else or what toll it takes on the rest of the family. The father has lost his strength as a provider and watched his marriage fall apart. The grandmother’s answer is prayer. In the end, nothing changes. Life goes on, despite the occasional fantasy in which Josh does indeed die, opening a door to survival that slams shut again when the dream ends.

Falling is traumatizing. It is also broadening and enlightening. The writing is precise and dead to rights. The direction gives the impression that the actors have been left enough space to make discoveries of their own. The evening goes in enough unorthodox directions to keep you transfixed. How wonderful that it goes on just long enough to make you want a sequel.

rreed@observer.com

Gaines and Kathleen McNanny in An Enemy of the People. (Joan Marcus)

Coming in an election year, when so many politicians polarize the electorate by confusing greed with moral good, the Manhattan Theater Club has picked a perfect time to revive Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 drama An Enemy of the People. Eschewing the most often used translation, by Arthur Miller, in favor of a new, trimmed-down version by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, the Broadway production at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre addresses the dilemma of one man’s idealistic struggle to buck authority and expose the truth in the face of a powerful opposition that reaches mob force. The play resonates today because a lot of do-gooders with hearts in the right place are eventually beaten into submission, giving in to the majority, whereas Ibsen’s hero faces ruin rather than compromise. Directed with force by Doug Hughes, this intermission-less outing cuts huge chunks of exposition and debate from Ibsen’s talky text, shortening a sometimes tedious play to manageable length, along with cutting some of the acting roles, but without excising any important values. It also provides two valiant actors, Boyd Gaines and Richard Thomas, with the opportunity to own the stage instead of leasing it. They are marvelous.

A coastal town in Norway with a spa that serves as a lucrative tourist attraction is the setting for a play of contrasting ideas. This is a village with a strong community spirit and a valid sense of prosperity, judiciously served by two brothers with equal stakes in their neighbors’ futures. The funding and construction of the baths is the work of the rigid, strong-willed mayor, Peter Stockmann (Mr. Thomas). He rules by the book, not always consulting the town fathers on matters of economy and decision-making. His brother Thomas (Mr. Gaines) is a scientist and intellectual with implacable values, a popular host, family man, respected pillar of the community and “hail fellow well met” who respects authority but holds steady in his devotion to the common man. When the baths regarded as “the pulsating heart of our idyllic community” are discovered to be a health hazard, a crisis erupts that divides Thomas and Peter as well as the town administrators and the people themselves. Thomas has discovered that poisons from the local tannery have seeped into the water. After secretly analyzing samples, the university lab has sent him the result: Bacteria swimming in the industrial toxins are posing a real menace to public safety. To rectify the situation, Thomas demands the closing of the spa while every water pipe is relaid. His brother the mayor has other priorities. In addition to warning of the gigantic expense of correcting a polluted water system, he convinces the newspaper editor, bureaucrats, bigots, moneylenders and rich citizens, all of whom want only to turn a profit, that closing down the spa would spell financial disaster. The impurity in the soil from the nearby swamp and the seepage from the tannery are the cause of the ensuing panic, but 19^th century playwright and social reformer Ibsen turns the whole thing into a metaphor for political corruption.

And so a polemic takes flight, with two heated sides of a moral argument debating in seamless prose. Where Thomas the self-righteous scientist sees disease and pestilence, Peter the pragmatic mayor sees ruin, lost revenues in the town coffers and a threat to his personal wealth. Promoting discretion, silence and the avoidance of scandal at any cost, he orders his brother to retract his evidence and then fires him as the town’s chief medical officer. Like a lot of modern political morality plays all the way up to and including Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, truth and honor battle power and practicality on a battlefield of twisted values that do not always end up benefiting the majority. In Act Two, both sides leech their ideals into tyranny. Up to this point, Peter is the villain, but now Thomas gives reason for alarm, too. Thomas’s convictions about saving the town extend to a coup, replacing the democratically elected government with young and fiercely committed new blood that is out for vengeance—and the good of the people is somehow subverted. This reversal of ideals leads to an unruly town meeting that turns the play into a political discourse. When freethinking is in danger of being stamped out by the mob mentality of the majority, and nobility of character and spirit erodes, just who is the real enemy of the people? Think National Socialism in Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s and you get a fist in the face of what Ibsen was getting at.

You also get the reason why An Enemy of the People was one of Ibsen’s least popular works. At its best, it has a theme in common with all Ibsen plays—the high cost of integrity. Hedda and Nora faced similar life-changing decisions, but A Doll’s House has more suspense and Hedda Gabler has more drama. My caveat is about the style used to express diversity. The lines are full of ire and rage, but the opposing opinions expressed by the two brothers explode in an annoying shouting match that could achieve more maximum impact in a softer, more persuasive staging. There are other ways of showing emotion rather than yelling. The play is relevant, but the direction lacks impact. Just because it has relevance does not make it dramatically exciting. This is in no way the fault of the actors. Mr. Gaines is a perfect voice of reason, and while I would usually expect to see Mr. Thomas in the more sympathetic role, his villainous but syrupy-tongued mayor sent chills down my spine. Both actors are so good that it would be fascinating to see them switch roles midway through the run, giving the play an added element of disparate but equally persuasive thrust. As it now stands, they evoke a sense of how politicians are the real enemy of the people and the individual who stands up for truth in the face of adversity is the real enemy of the ignorant majority.

Unquestionably, this take on An Enemy of the People is a production worth seeing of a play worth seeing again.

rreed@observer.com

Freeman and Madsen in The Magic of Belle Isle.

The Magic of Belle Isle is a warm, human, feel-good experience about bringing out the best in people, one that brings out Morgan Freeman’s best performance in years. He plays a grizzled old drunk named Monte Wildhorn, a once-revered author of epic western novels suffering from writer’s block who has become so miserable and depressed since losing his wife to cancer that he has retired his career to the inside of a bottle of sour mash whiskey. Cynical, reclusive and partially dependant on a motorized wheelchair, he has come to a small lakeside community in upstate New York to escape from the pressures of responsibility, reality and people—by drinking himself into a stupor. Unfortunately, the summer house his nephew has found for him to hide away in comes equipped with a dependant dog named Ringo the owner left behind, an annoyingly friendly community of covered-dish suppers and a compassionate next-door neighbor named Charlotte O’Neil (Virginia Madsen), a single mom with three daughters. Against his best instincts, Monte develops a fondness for them all, especially the 9-year-old infatuated with science fiction who wants to be a writer. Reluctantly, he becomes her mentor, dispensing advice about style, imagination and inspiration (“Most of the time real life doesn’t measure up to what’s in your head”). The smallest and youngest girl loves elephants, so he gets his old typewriter out from under the mothballs and writes a story about a pachyderm named Tony, a story that eventually leads to a series. You already know what’s coming: it turns out that this is the summer when Monte decides to rejoin the human race. After an amalgam of shared experiences—measured gently with brush strokes of sweetness and learning-—at summer’s ends he has not only reactivated his mind and his career, but found his dormant heart as well.

Reunited with Rob Reiner, who directed him in The Bucket List, Mr. Freeman’s unwavering dignity, charm and intelligence are put to good use. Ms. Madsen is wasted, but her no-nonsense honesty is in evidence, too. I admire her unglazed presence and naturalism as well as her deglamorized Hollywood look. In every role, no matter how diverse, she always seems to come from another saner, nicer place than the movies. Mr. Reiner, who has often shown a fondness for earlier, less complex periods in America’s past, is the perfect director to bring out these qualities. The screenplay, which he wrote with Guy Thomas and Andrew Scheinman, sometimes seems hokey, sentimental and totally predictable, but in a film this affectionate these are welcome qualities. The kids text and talk on cell phones, but the whole movie seems to take place in another time—before the plague of reality TV, when people still knew how to take the time out of a busy day to  communicate through conversation and feelings. (Monte writes bestsellers and doesn’t even know how to use a computer.) The best thing about the film is the gentle way Mr. Reiner allows his characters to develop until their troubles become part of the human coil. You can quarrel with the smiley-face outcome of every ordeal, but the tenderness and optimism are so powerful and ingratiating that only a viewer with the darkest sensibility will go away untouched. When the waning days of summer signal fall’s impending arrival, you feel like these characters are old friends, and the magic of Belle Isle is self-evident.

rreed@observer.com

THE MAGIC OF BELLE ISLE

Running Time 109 minutes

Written by Guy Thomas, Rob Reiner and Andrew Scheinman

Directed by Rob Reiner

Starring Morgan Freeman, Virginia Madsen and Madeline Carroll

3/4

Blanchard and Sorvino in Union Square.

The acting in Nancy Savoca’s Union Square is so strong it almost makes you forget what a total zero the rest of this undernourished little throwaway film really is. Like another overpraised female director, Lynn Shelton, and her latest chamber-music tedium, Your Sister’s Sister, this lazy little tone poem about two rival and disparate sisters is a talkathon going nowhere. Nothing worth repeating is ever uttered, and nothing worth remembering ever happens. Mercifully, it is over in 80 minutes.

Brash, noisy, sobbing and bordering on hysterics, Mira Sorvino is Lucy, a neurotic dingbat who arrives in Manhattan by train, makes a series of frustrating phone calls and sends an unlimited barrage of unanswered text messages to a lover named Jay, meeting unexpected rejection and hostility at every turn, then drags shopping bags full of things she doesn’t need and a poodle named Murray to the Union Square loft of her sister Jenny (Tammy Blanchard), who is alarmed to see her, to say the least; they haven’t spoken to each other for three years. Up to this point, you think Lucy has traveled thousands of miles, but she has come only from the Bronx. The siblings have nothing in common but that doesn’t stop them from a stream of unstoppable babble. Swerving violently amid frustration, rage and desperate need, Lucy curses loudly and changes clothes so rapidly that she seems to be on a collision course with a nervous breakdown. Personally, I kept wishing she would get it over with and leave, but Union Square does us no such favor: 80 minutes seem like 80 days—at hard labor.

The sisters are polar opposites. Jenny is organized and disciplined. Lucy is an obnoxious flake. Jenny is engaged to marry her roommate, Bill (Mike Doyle, who was memorably gang raped and electrocuted on the HBO series Oz). In a real change of pace, he now plays an uptight, anal retentive preppie who is militant about his daily runs, organic food, a rigid health routine and tofu. He is paranoid about alcohol, dog hair, germs and second-hand smoke, so when Lucy’s dog lounges on the furniture while she wolfs down vodka gimlets and puffs away like Bette Davis, it’s like leaving the toilet seat in the up position. He is also confused. He thinks the girls are from the preppy coves of Maine, not the ethnic stews of the Bronx. In one night, Lucy breaks every house rule, drags Jenny off to a smoky dance club, informs her sister that their crazy mother, after numerous attempts at suicide, finally got her wish, then teeters on the edge of a bridge as she contemplates jumping herself.

While Ms. Savoca directs the action in a series of claustrophobic close-ups that make you long for the days of movies like Gone with the Wind and Giant, it drags on, like a bagpipe that needs a tune-up. In her ruffled skirts, patterned stockings and high-heel fur boots, Mira Sorvino invades Tammy Blanchard’s ordered life like an extraterrestrial. So it comes as a surprise when Lucy returns for a vegetarian Thanksgiving of meatless lasagna and organic cranberry sauce with a husband and a child. But that is the film’s only surprise and it seems lamely contrived. Nothing else occurs to sustain interest, although a few days with Lucy loosens Jenny up enough to admit to Bill she’s from the Bronx, not Maine, and she hates his trail mix. The actors are so good, though, that they make you want to see what they could do in a better movie than this tedious acting-class experiment.

Your move.

rreed@observer.com

UNION SQUARE

Running Time 80 minutes

Written by Nancy Savoca and Mary Tobler

Directed by Nancy Savoca

Starring Tammy Blanchard, Mira Sorvino and Michael Rispoli

2/4

Michael D'Addario and Banks in People Like Us.

People Like Us is a conveyor belt romcom about a tough tomato with a kid to raise, calloused by life’s shin kicks and cynical with despair, who falls in love at last with the perfect guy she’s waited for her entire life, unaware that he’s really her brother. It sounds awful, but the big surprise is that in spite of its too-obvious directorial flaws, it has an emotional impact (for me, anyway) I can’t resist, reinforced by the guileless chemistry of a perfect cast and the genuine humanity in the script. In a summer overloaded with numbing junk movies masquerading as gum-chewing blockbusters, this is a rare feel-good treat that nudges the heartstrings and makes you feel optimistic about the human race.

Writer-director Alex Kurtzman, whose unoriginal, face-slapping big-budget action programmers (Star Trek, Cowboys and Aliens and the Transformers copycats) leave me colder than refrigerated leftover pizza, makes his first attempt at serious filmmaking with this uneven but basically endearing look at unhappy people who learn through hard knocks and rough mistakes to look at life with new priorities and fresh perspectives. Chris Pine, impossibly handsome, secretly talented, but totally wasted for most of his career in meaningless cookie-cutter action epics, makes a giant leap forward as an actor of both range and subtlety in a new kind of role. He is Sam Harper, a slick New York salesman who is having a bad day. His latest hustle has landed him in job jeopardy, and before he can talk his way out of legal troubles that could lead to a criminal investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, his estranged father, a famous Hollywood record producer, dies in L.A. Urged to attend the funeral by his pragmatic law-school fiancée Hannah (Olivia Wilde), Sam heads for JFK but misses the last plane because he left home without a photo ID, arriving in L.A. so late that he misses the ceremony, too, incurring the wrath of his infuriated mother, Lillian (Michelle Pfeiffer). (Hard to believe, but yes, the still-beautiful superstar has now joined the ranks of aging stars relegated to playing aging parents. This one is a step up from the embarrassing mother of a werewolf she recently played in Dark Shadows.)

All Sam’s father left him in his will is his old LP record collection and a shaving kit containing $150,000 designated to be delivered to a mysterious woman named Frankie (played by Elizabeth Banks with an engaging been-around-and-seen-it-all honesty that grows on you), a single mother with a precocious 11-year-old son named Josh. Following Frankie to an A.A. meeting, Sam discovers she’s a recovering alcoholic and addict, once a hat-check girl at the Troubadour and a Joni Mitchell wannabe, who has spent a lot of troubled years in rehab, with no help from her illegitimate father, and now ekes out a living as a barmaid. Sam also uncovers the astonishing fact that she’s a half-sibling he never knew about. He knows he should do the right thing and turn over the money, but curiosity to find out more leads both mother and son into emotional areas that spiral out of control. Not knowing who Sam really is, Frankie falls for him. Between endless jump cuts, too much fast television-style editing and a bumpy pace that threatens to kill the film’s underlying sensitivity, Mr. Kurtzman also fails to resist the unwise clutter of a dated falling-in-love montage (cracking crab legs in a seafood restaurant at the beach, doing laundry at a Hollywood washateria, posing with a motorcycle gang for laughs, eating tacos, learning to trust). Layer by layer, secrets are revealed, mysteries get solved and hearts are broken in a movie about parents and children, brothers and sisters, immaturity and responsibility, letting go and starting over.

Based on true events in the lives of director Kurtzman, involving meeting an adult half-sister he never knew, and of co-writer Roberto Orci, a college friend whose aunt found out her own father had a secret family he didn’t tell her about, People Like Us is informed by real feelings uncorked like a lost bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon hidden away in a dark corner of a private wine cellar. Mr. Kurtzman is a better writer than director. One minute his movie shows a perceptive compassion for the way people talk and feel, and the next minute it churns its way into conventional TV motion sickness like it is filling spaces between Cheerios commercials.

Still, the actors make up for any and all deficiencies. The natural chemistry between Mr. Pine and Ms. Banks more than smooths out the contrived screenplay away from the artificial—Sam’s refusal to tell Frankie the truth, hand over her inheritance and seal her chances for a better life for her own tortured kid grows annoying—and into the direction of plausibility. Michelle Pfeiffer reveals her own mixed emotions about the secrets she’s been concealing for years, too young to forgive and too old to forget what it feels like to live with pain and betrayal. They work tirelessly, elevating banal characters—concocted for no other purpose than stretching a perfunctory outline to meet the demands of a full-length movie—into real relationships between likeable people who redefine the limits of friends and family.

rreed@observer.com

PEOPLE LIKE US

Running Time 115 minutes

Written by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Jody Lambert

Directed by Alex Kurtzman

Starring Chris Pine, Elizabeth Banks and Michelle Pfeiffer

3/4

Parsons in Harvey.

Harvey is the one about the amiable 39-year-old dipsomaniac Elwood P. Dowd and his best friend and constant companion Harvey, a white rabbit, standing tall at six feet three and a half inches, who, to the mortification of his family, is invisible to everyone but Elwood—or almost. The play by Mary Chase was a big hit in 1944 (inexplicably, it won an undeserved Pulitzer Prize) starring Frank Fay (Barbara Stanwyck’s first husband) and the fabulously ditzy character actress Josephine Hull, who recreated her role in the critically acclaimed 1950 film, sharing the screen with a triumphant performance by James Stewart, whose wife, Gloria, said at the time, “You stay at the studio—send Harvey home to me.”

In the genial Roundabout translation currently on view at Studio 54, the eccentric Elwood is essayed by the stage play’s star, Jim Parsons, he of the curiously abortive and alarmingly overrated five-years-and-still-running television sitcom, The Big Bang Theory. He is no Jimmy Stewart, but he has a wiry charm air-brushed with a dusty Texas twang that is perfectly suited to a borderline mental patient with impeccable old-world manners. If you’re up for some warm and gentle whimsy in a charmingly fanciful farce peppered with a tiny touch of pathos, Mr. Parsons gives a droll performance and the play is a nice dose of tonic. The thin-as-parchment plot revolves around the wackiness that ensues when the boozer’s distraught sister, Veta, and uptight niece, Myrtle Mae, reduced to desperation by their unenviable position in the community as relatives of “the biggest screwball in town,” try to slap Elwood into the loony bin. They want to hide this family embarrassment, but Elwood owns the house, so in a sense they are strangely beholden to him. Commitment papers are the answer, but complications arise when he is mistakenly released, the addled Veda gets locked up in his place, and the senior psychiatrist of the sanitarium starts downing cocktails, playing the jukebox and seeing Harvey himself.

The major charm of this affectionate albeit dated conceit is its nonjudgmental view of an endearing lush—Mr. Parsons has a slight trace of imbecility at first, but he is such a sweet, harmless, good-natured innocent that he grows on you. Mr. Parsons is a pleasant, open-faced actor—no planes in his face, no shadows on his brow, just open spaces like a baby. The rotund, terminally baffled Josephine Hull is sorely missed. Jessica Hecht can’t begin to equal her comic brilliance (nobody could), and her writhing and scissoring her legs like an oversexed octopus borders on hysteria. She fusses and flutters like Josephine Hull, but her Veda seems dafter than Mr. Parsons’ Elwood. Tasty contributions by Carol Kane, Charles Kimbrough and Larry Bryggman add to the farce, and David Rockwell’s old-fashioned Victorian house, replete with carpeted stairs, framed wall cameos, crown moldings and leather Chesterfield chairs, gives them a colorful backdrop to prance around in. I still wish I could find the deeper significance in Harvey or figure out what an invisible white rabbit represents metaphorically, but to his credit Scott Ellis keeps the whimsy in check, and a good time is had by all.

rreed@observer.com

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

Babies on board in Brooklyn... (New York Shitty

Williamsburg daddies are having a hard time finding space for both their fedora collections and their toddlers. The market, that once blossomed as a studio, one- and two-bedroom artist haven, is struggling to adjust to new family-orientated demands, the Journal notes.

Only 13 percent of the apartments on the market in Williamsburg are above 1500 square feet. The rate is even worse in Fort Greene, at 7 percent. Across the river and through the forest of Central Park, a staggering 65% of apartments are larger than 1500 square feet on the Upper West Side.

Brooklyn developers were uneasy with larger apartments‚ it's quite the burden when a huge million—dollar apartment doesn't sell—but some are making efforts to appeal to the moms and dads. Jeffrey Levine of Douglaston Development, who built the massive 565-unit Edge building in Williamsburg, noted that 5 percent of the units are three-bedroom in the Edge and his next condo project will jump to 10 percent of the units.

The efforts are progressing slowly for some. Katie Pymm, yoga instructor and mother of two, has been searching with her husband for the past three years for a larger space, "We've looked at everything—new condos, older buildings, loft-style. There are a few three-bedrooms, but they tend to go quickly."

It's a little weird to think of Williamsburg as a toddler playground, but it's hard to not notice when you have been run over by a stroller brigade.

mewing@observer.com

Reaser and Butz as a rather close niece and uncle in How I Learned to Drive.

It’s always a pleasure to experience a well-written, expertly staged and sensitively acted play that is both provocative and off the beaten path. The current Off-Broadway revival of How I Learned to Drive, Paula Vogel’s 1998 critical blockbuster about incest, child abuse and destructive sexual empowerment, is such a play. Its excellent, limited run at Second Stage on West 43rd Street (through March 11, but don’t be surprised if packed houses and good reviews lead to an extension) is a must-see, and with the marvelous two-time Tony-winner Norbert Leo Butz taking a break from musicals to portray the tragic role of a pedophile with an oily charm that makes him understandable if not entirely forgivable, missing such an opportunity is out of the question.

I’m not sure I understand why this slight, 90-minute, one-act play won the Pulitzer Prize in a year that also produced the unforgettable musical sensation Side Show and the savage Irish drama The Beauty Queen of Leenane, but it does hold up well in retrospect. The story spans some 30 years in the life of a girl known only by her family nickname, Li’l Bit, as she looks back on her sexually charged relationship with a favorite married uncle called Uncle Peck, who lavished her with affection from ages 11 to 18. Ms. Vogel writes on cruise control as she soft pedals her way through the lives of two disturbed people in the rural farmland and back roads of suburban Maryland. Looking back to the summer she was 17 and taking driving lessons from a man old enough to be her father, Li’l Bit inspires suspicion about her own sexual response to the hand inching its way under her skirt and into her panties. Dirt, agriculture and the smell of animals and hay under a full moon, and you see why Uncle Peck was intoxicated. Thanks to Mr. Butz’s three-dimensional performance, his character’s dysfunctional side is perfectly balanced with the “normal” side of his frustrated personality. He can unhook the buttons on her blouse with one hand and beg to kiss her “celestial orbs” at the same time, instructing her to keep her own hands firmly on the steering wheel. At 17, her breasts are so big her family jokes about writing Dolly Parton for some of her hand-me-down bras. But nobody’s fascination with them excites her as much as her favorite uncle, a former Marine who was stationed in the Pacific, as he keeps reassuring her “nothing’s gonna happen ’til you want it to” and “I’m a patient man—I’ve been waiting a long time.” There’s an ease to the writing, and Mr. Butz is so moving in depicting Uncle Peck’s balking inhibition that you can’t help but feel sympathy for him. This is not the way it’s supposed to play out in the world of pedophilia, but Ms. Vogel is careful to wisely refrain from passing moral judgment. Uncle Peck is a predator who makes you care because Ms. Vogel makes you care, and the power of the writing is that you care without feeling guilty. At the least of it, the girl’s emerging sexuality and confused sense of identity, fueled by her uncle’s sadness and desperation to love, make you wonder who is doing what to whom. The driving lessons, while reciting passages from driver’s instruction manuals, become an insidious metaphor for sexual seduction.

He’s such a sweet man the neighbors “borrow” him to help out—shoveling snow, jump-starting their dead car batteries. His sweetness shows in one scene in which he tries to teach a nephew how to catch a pompano, then throws it back when the boy feels sorry for the fish. He’s troubled, but the girl is a master of manipulation, too. As played by the gifted and lovely Elizabeth Reaser (so rounded and memorable as the pregnant older sister in the film The Family Stone), Li’l Bit has vulnerability, but it is clear she is not entirely innocent. She’s more like Nabokov’s Lolita—clearly cognizant of her power and more in charge of her fate than you suspect—and Mr. Butz finds a sweaty humor in the role of a pathetic older man with uncontrollable urges, giving Uncle Peck a sympathetic dimension, doing his best to avoid moustache-twirling lecherousness. The play is not a psychological mystery about what has already gone wrong in his life—it’s a tense and artfully restrained memory piece about the consequences of emotional scar tissue.

The structure of How I Learned to Drive takes dramatic detours into past, present and future tenses as Ms. Vogel makes it clear that both Uncle Peck and the object of his carnal passion made unpredictable choices. This juxtaposition of vignettes is clearly guided by Kate Whoriskey’s firm, sparse direction. A lot of things go unresolved, making the salient dramatic point that in life, human behavior is rarely fair and never easily pigeonholed. Like good theater, if you ask me.

rreed@observer.com

Elkaim and Donzelli.

From France, a gentle, uneven, but touching and true chronicle of the fight to save the life of a child with brain cancer called Declaration of War is doubly notable because the baby’s real-life mother is the film’s director, Valérie Donzelli, who also costars and coauthored the screenplay with the baby’s father, actor Jérémie Elkaïm. Although they are no longer together and are living their own separate personal lives, their story, fictionalized but still autobiographical, bonded them for life. Apparently, they are best friends whose dedicated collaboration was the only way they could tell this harrowing story. It’s a brave effort any way you slice it.

The irony of a man named Romeo (Mr. Elkaïm) meeting a girl in a disco named Juliette (Ms. Donzelli) is so wonky they can’t stop laughing. Despite her prediction that, like Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers, a terrible fate awaits them, a torrid affair begins. Happiness is imminent, until the baby’s sudden arrival reminds them of their differences. She’s an artist who earns the living while he stays home and minds the infant. She has two sisters and a father with money who buys them an apartment. An only child who never knew his father, he was raised by a single mother who is an outgoing, independent lesbian. But the loose ends come together anyway, tied by the domestic strings of love and parenthood, until a pediatrician in Marseilles detects a brain tumor. Friends and family descend—Romeo on a motorcycle, her parents in a car, his mother and her younger wife by train. But this is very much a story told by a young filmmaker, about two parents forced to face a tragedy beyond their years, making immature choices that defy conventional wisdom. First, they flee Marseilles, leaving the adults behind, hitchhiking to Paris with their sick baby in their arms. Then, during a nine-hour brain surgery, Romeo and Juliette lie in bed imagining worst-case scenarios about the possible repercussions. What if the baby ends up blind, a deaf mute or a dwarf? Or queer? “And a right-wing nut case,” adds Romeo, laughing. Humor is wedged into the anguish to relieve tension, but it’s the kind of piteous drollery only the young would find witty. The baby miraculously recovers, but the rest of the movie covers the next five years of chemotherapy, bone marrow transplants, isolation in sterile rooms to avoid bacterial infections—while we’re forced to live through every minute of it.

The movie gets grimmer by the minute. The baby goes through hell. The parents go bankrupt and eventually the emotional toll drives them apart searching for peace. I won’t spoil the suspense by telling you how it ends, but I admit I admire the writing and acting of the two brave stars, who declare war on film in which there is only one enemy to fight—their child’s deadly disease. To that goal, their methods are sometimes annoying, resorting to montages, superimposed images, slow motion camera tricks and one especially irritating sequence that has the parents launching into a romantic duet, musically declaring their love like they’ve seen too many Jacques Demy musicals. For my taste, there’s entirely too much source music, from Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” and Offenbach’s “La Vie Parisienne” to a Brazilian bossa nova by Luis Bonfa. One violin would have done the job just as effectively, in half the time. To their credit, they have stamped a mark of authenticity on the solemnity of their ordeal by filming in the actual hospitals and rehab clinics where their own child endured years of agony suspended between life and death. But be forewarned: because so much of it takes place in antiseptic institutions, the white subtitles against the white walls are often impossible to read.

Despite reservations, I admire Declaration of War and the two stars, who used the bad things that happened in their personal lives to tell a gripping human story that reaches a positive conclusion about truth in cinema.

rreed@observer.com

DECLARATION OF WAR

Running Time 100 minutes

Written by Jérémie Elkaïm and Valérie Donzelli

Directed by Valérie Donzelli

Starring Valérie Donzelli, Jérémie Elkaïm and César Desseix

2.5/4