Blunt and Duplass in Your Sister's Sister.

Lynn Shelton, writer-director of the titillating but underwhelming male psyche exam Humpday, about two straight guys who test their macho friendship by making a gay porn film about having sex with each other on camera before fizzling out at the last minute, has come up with another actionless talkathon called Your Sister’s Sister. What is it with this talented low-budget indie filmmaker whose gabfests take on brave ideas and then talk themselves to death, gasping for breath between monologues? I’ve seen Your Sister’s Sister twice, and fallen asleep in the same place both times. It’s a credit to the actors that it ended up winning me over in spite of myself.

Eulogizing his dead brother a year after his death at an impromptu cocktail-party memorial, Jack (the annoying but charmingly naturalistic mumblecore actor Mark Duplass, who played one of the endlessly overly analytical potential screw-ees in Humpday), not only takes issue with the loving remarks expressed by the dearly departed’s friends but ends up making a scene by insulting them in the bargain. Jack’s best friend, Iris (Emily Blunt), also his late brother’s ex-girlfriend who dumped him, sends Jack off to her father’s remote cabin on an island off the coast of Seattle. No TV. No Internet. Just a place to think, rest and get some alone time. When Jack arrives on his bicycle, understandably exhausted, he finds the isolated retreat already occupied by Iris’ sister Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt), an unhappy lesbian who is nursing her own wounds after breaking up with her longtime lover. Hannah is not happy to have her space invaded, but they sip tequila, munch dehydrated bananas and mutter nonstop dialogue, mostly inconsequential and largely improvised. “I’m not good for small talk,” says Jack, “so I apologize if I’m barging through the doors of our privacy or anything.” But that doesn’t stop anyone in Lynn Shelton movies. After a meaningless drunken monologue about the appeal of her butt, Jack adds, “Let me tell you another thing which is inappropriate but super-safe because you’re a lesbian—if I were differently equipped or if you were differently inclined, this night might go a very different way. I’m just saying I would be super-open to that in a whole other universe.” Not the least of the resulting implausibilities as they go to bed together is the fact that it’s the lesbian who provides the condom.

Iris shows up unexpectedly the next morning with a bag of groceries and then it’s three people instead of two, going yadda yadda yadda about everything from pubic hair to how a dollop of butter in vegan Hannah’s mashed potatoes is the inhuman equivalent of five pounds of fear. When’s the last time you watched an entire scene about the preparation of flaxseed pancakes?

The jabber is maddening, but with all due respect, the actors are wonderful, the performances as natural as inhaling. Still, in Emily Blunt’s case, there is such a thing as too natural. She mumbles, whispers and makes inaudible words with her tongue. There’s one entire scene in bed where she is totally incomprehensible. Nothing ever happens of any consequence, but everybody talks about it. When she discovers Hannah broke up with her girlfriend because she wanted children, Iris blurts out advice that seems so practical (“You can go online. There’s sperm donors. There’s sperm in the air. Just grab a dude and preg yourself up!”) you tend to forget that nobody you know ever talks like that. It’s bad enough when Iris, who secretly knows her feelings for Jack have passed the platonic stage, finds out Hannah got into his underwear first. But then Iris and Jack both discover Hannah poked holes in the condom—and all hell breaks loose. Can Jack marry Iris and father her sister’s baby at the same time? Does anybody care?

Like all Lynn Shelton films, the characters develop big intimacies in small doses, with humor that swings from understated to raunchy. It takes a while for them to break through the roadblocks of rhetoric and reach your heart. But thanks to the sweet goofiness of Mark Duplass (how refreshing to encounter a leading man who appears to have never seen the inside of a gym), the pragmatism of Emily Blunt and the conflicted self-control of Rosemarie DeWitt (best remembered as the unhinged bride in Rachel Getting Married), this three-hander has an honesty and a momentum that I found grudgingly rewarding.

rreed@observer.com

YOUR SISTER’S SISTER

Running Time 90 minutes

Written and Directed by Lynn Shelton

Starring Mark Duplass, Emily Blunt and Rosemarie DeWitt

2/4

Pine and Hardy contemplating why, exactly, they are fighting for Witherspoon.

More secret agents appear in a pharmacologically induced state of general anesthesia called This Means War. A hack called simply McG, who perpetrated on the world such forgettable trash wallows as two idiotic Charlie’s Angels movies and Terminator Salvation, is hardly the professional you want around to monitor the dosage. The result is 98 minutes of moronic stupidity already being labeled on the Internet as “the worst movie of the year.” A premature assessment? Maybe. It’s only February. But after This Means War, one thing is certain: The year has nowhere to go but up.

Tuck (Tom Hardy, the tattooed Muscle McGurk from England who surprised everybody in Warrior) and FDR (Chris Pine) are best buds and inseparable partners who throw people off the roofs of buildings, smash up cities and declare war on entire enemy nations. Nothing can come between them, including the CIA database, which they use illegally to research girls. Nothing, that is, until they fall for the same girl, a motor mouth product researcher, whatever that is, played by the once-discriminating but no longer fresh or versatile Reese Witherspoon. Suddenly it’s a fight to the double bed to see which one wears Brut and which one wears patchouli. Using top-secret classified files and video-surveillance equipment at the CIA field office in Los Angeles, they break every law to spy on each other right up to and including in Ms. Witherspoon’s bedroom. One pretends to be a travel agent. The other passes himself off as a ship’s captain. And she’s dumb enough to believe them both. It’s not clear which one she will choose after a night in the Porthault linen, but you get a good idea when she tells her sluttish nymphomaniac girlfriend about Mr. Pine, “Four in one night!” She’s talking orgasms, not tequila shots.

As CIA operatives, Mr. Hardy and Mr. Pine have all the credibility of Abbott and Costello. For two-thirds of the movie, nothing happens to write home about. Then, just when the movie is gasping its final death rattle, the international assassin whose brother was killed on one of their bungled missions in Hong Kong arrives, and the three stars spend the rest of the running time doing just that—running, smashing up the freeway, destroying cars and public property, blowing up trucks and helicopters and … but why go on? If undercover spies for the CIA spend every waking hour of the day and night using government property to act like imbeciles, I shudder to think what Homeland Security will do to protect the country in an emergency. I know this is a desperate farce without a laugh in sight, but the movie is dead on arrival and not even Ms. Witherspoon can save it. It is, however, high time she started thinking about saving herself—and what’s left of her film career.

rreed@observer.com

THIS MEANS WAR

Running Time 98 minutes

Written by Timothy Dowling and Simon Kinberg

Directed by McG

Starring Reese Witherspoon, Chris Pine and Tom Hardy

0/4