Ivanir, Hoffman, Keener and Walken in A Late Quartet.

In A Late Quartet, a somber, moody and uneven film about chamber music and the dedicated professional musicians who devote their lives to playing it, Christopher Walken takes some getting used to as a renowned cellist with Parkinson’s disease who is forced begrudgingly to end his career as leader of one of the world’s most celebrated string quartets. A far cry from the lurid and sloppy addicts, psychopaths and serial killers he usually plays as though walking in his sleep, it’s not the kind of role I would personally think of as perfect casting for him. Also, the movie is too slow, highbrow and sophisticated to draw the youth market that loves to see Mr. Walken play violent and stoned in trash like Seven Psychopaths. But playing the cello is such a pleasant change of pace that he eventually grows on you, scene by scene, proving for the first time since his role as Leonardo DiCaprio’s troubled father 10 years ago in Catch Me If You Can, that he really can act. He—along with the rest of the elegant cast—keeps A Late Quartet in tune when it threatens to go flat. 

The Fugue, a famous ensemble much like the Guarneri Quartet, has been filling concert halls for 25 years. It consists of cellist-concertmaster Peter Mitchell (Mr. Walken), first violinist Daniel Lerner (Mark Ivanir), second violinist Robert Gelbart (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Robert’s wife, Juliette (Catherine Keener), on viola. As the new season begins, they are rehearsing all seven movements of the intricate Beethoven String Quartet, Opus 13. As soon as you realize the film runs the length of most chamber music concerts, you might panic at the thought of being forced to sit through the whole thing. Not to worry. Director Yaron Zilberman soon makes it clear that he is more interested in the emotional upheavals in the lives of the four high-strung musicians than he is in the music they play. It takes a long time to get around to the program they’re rehearsing, and by then you might wish they had started earlier. As soon as Peter’s crippling disease is diagnosed, the theme becomes “Move Over, Beethoven.”

You know it’s coming when Mr. Walken starts stretching his fingers to strengthen the grip on his bow. Clearly his reflexes and coordination are failing. The others, who have been with him for a quarter of a century, look the other way. But this is a pragmatic perfectionist. He starts to plan his farewell concert and seek a replacement. Robert, the second violinist, takes this inopportune time to announce his long-festering resentment of Daniel, the first violinist, who refuses to alternate solos.

The tension grows, opening a floodgate when Peter announces his plan to hire Robert and Juliette’s daughter Alexandra (Imogen Poots), who is a talented and promising cellist on her way to stardom, to replace him. Further complicating the volatility of an already complex situation is the fact that without Robert and Juliette’s knowledge, Alexandra, who feels neglected and ignored by her parents, is sleeping with the sensitive and petulant Daniel, her coach, who years earlier had an affair with Juliette, now causing a rift between mother and daughter. Worse still, Juliette, who never fully committed to her husband, catches Robert working out his frustrations in bed with another woman, and their marriage collapses. What began as an intelligent film about real music (instead of the junk that poisons contemporary rock soundtracks) loses its way and collapses under the weight of a shameless soap opera. With so much sturm und drang,it’s a miracle these musicians ever find the time to play a simple adagio.

Everyone ends up emotionally shredded, with the future of the Fugue Quartet endangered. Like all passionate artists, however, they come to their senses in time to realize that craft comes first and personal lives are a lower priority, and in the final minutes, we at last get around to the Beethoven. The movie sometimes gets stuck in its own awkward groove like a needle on a warped phonograph, but it has its moments. The script, co-written by the director Mr. Zilberman and Seth Grossman, contains technical information about how to construct, polish and cherish a good violin, and the four actors make you believe they actually know how to play their instruments. They skillfully demonstrate how each member of the quartet brings to the table one of the four legs that hold it upright: Mr. Ivanir has enough precision and driving perfectionism for four, Mr. Hoffman adds color and texture, Ms. Keener provides the mournful passion, and Mr. Walken is the patriarch of the group, with the heart, soul and discipline to keep the music balanced. The pileup of romantic entanglements and competitive egos gets in the way of the music, but the soundtrack is glorious, even if it is truncated. The final concert was filmed on the actual stage at the Metroplitan Museum, where the Guarneri Quartet gave its final performance after 45 years together. In A Late Quartet, life imitates art in more ways than one.

rreed@observer.com

A LATE QUARTET

Running Time 105 minutes

Written by Seth Grossman and Yaron Zilberman

Directed by Yaron Zilberman

Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christopher Walken and Catherine Keener

2.5/4

Adams and Eastwood in Trouble with the Curve.

In the often illustrious career oeuvre of Clint Eastwood, Trouble with the Curve is a minor entry, a cinematic footnote. Worse yet, the screenplay and first-time direction, by Mr. Eastwood’s friend and long-time producing partner Robert Lorenz, seems like a loyalty benefit, a lazy afterthought. After such post-Dirty Harry triumphs as Unforgiven, Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby, color it disappointing. 

Eastwood plays Gus Lobel, a miserable old codger whose sharp-tongued snarl and cracked Gravel Gertie grumble makes him sound like the same sourball he played in his previous also-ran, Grand Torino. Gus is a grizzled talent scout with the Atlanta Braves with more wrinkles in his face than the gray hairs on his balding head. He’s sick, and he’s seen better days, but even if the apple won’t bite, he’s not giving up and he’s not giving in. Gus may breakfast on tinned Spam, trip over chairs and other simple household obstacles and harrumph his way through the Medicare years, but he can still spot a future baseball star from an airplane. Time is passing him by (he doesn’t even use a computer, which makes him a T. Rex after my own heart), but Gus can still hear the mark of a great pitcher by the crack of a bat. The problem is, his eyesight is failing so fast that he can’t always see what he’s doing, even when he hears it. One of his greatest discoveries was a batter who has lost his stride. Now the Braves are questioning his judgment. They want to draft a hot young rookie batter using new technology (shades of Moneyball), and with only three months to go before his contract expires, Gus wants one last chance to prove his value. If he can’t see what he’s supposed to be appraising, he could be fired. He needs help, and the only person he can call on is his resentful daughter Mickey (Amy Adam). Gus has always been a self-absorbed absentee father with poor parenting skills, and Mickey is now a successful Atlanta lawyer—on the verge of becoming a partner in her firm—who doesn’t want anything to do with him. But in the kind of plot contrivance you find only in the movies, Mickey knows more about baseball than her father. Go figure. Reluctantly, she takes her first weekend off in seven years, showing up on Gus’ scouting trip to North Carolina and straining her credibility with the competitive sharks in line for her promotion in order to save her dad’s reputation. When the hotshot pitcher the Braves want to hire fails to impress him, Gus has to find a way to buck authority that could alter the future of baseball.

Half domestic family drama, half gentle sports saga with the saga part missing, Trouble with the Curve is less riveting than it ought to be. Amy Adams more than makes up for her ill-fated appearance in the abominable The Master,and I must admit I laughed at the sight of macho Marlboro Man Eastwood busting up a chair, kicking it into a corner and calling it “feng shui.” But the hearty moments are rare, and Randy Brown’s screenplay fails to resist sentimentality. (In one scene, Gus visits his wife’s grave and speaks the lyrics to “You Are My Sunshine,” bordering on embarrassment.) A star of this caliber has earned the right to an off-day at the movies, but I guess I have come to expect a whole lot more. Meanwhile, Mickey falls for a former Red Sox pitcher named Johnny “The Flame” Flanagan (a miscast Justin Timberlake), who scouts for a rival team. This is called conflict. The estranged father-daughter relationship, however, just plods along between innings. Against Gus’ objections, the Braves overrule him and pick the pitcher he considered flawed. Now it’s up to Mickey to prove to John Goodman, Robert Patrick, Matthew Lillard and other accomplished cast members playing friends, enemies and assorted cynics on the Braves management staff that their prize catch cannot hit a curve ball. She also presents her own discovery as a replacement, just in time for a corny ending I did not find entirely convincing. If you believe an accomplished, self-made woman gives up a law partnership to manage the career of an unknown, then there’s this lifetime championship trophy with your name on it in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, that I can sell you cheap.

rreed@observer.com

TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE

Running Time 111 minutes

Written by Randy Brown

Directed by Robert Lorenz

Starring Clint Eastwood, Amy Adams and John Goodman

2/4

Lee Jones and Streep in Hope Springs. (Columbia Pictures)

In an age of idiotic garbage overpopulated with alternate realities and toxic avengers in Halloween costumes, I cannot tell you how touching, restorative and vitamin-enriching it is to see a gentle, tender and intelligent film with A-list stars playing real people dealing with real problems in the everyday world. Instead of stupid gags and punchlines, Hope Springs is a character study in elegiac pastels about how people love, then change and eventually drift away from each other—and the daunting energy it takes for them to get their old mojo back while the apple still bites. Separately, Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones are national treasures, but together they are simultaneously spectacular and intimately awe-inspiring. I have never loved either one more.

They play Kay and Arnold, a middle-class couple from Omaha, wed for 31 years in a union once ignited with spark plugs, now reduced through the curdled habit of uninspired routine to a stale marriage that needs a new transmission. Their two kids are grown and independent; they sleep in different rooms, Arnold spends so much time on the golf course and watching TV sports replays that Kay sighs, “It’s like being married to ESPN.” Her life makes a two-hour bonus episode of Desperate Housewives look like 10 minutes of aerobics. Hard work in the kitchen produces meals consumed quietly by Arnold with nothing more than a grunt before he retires to the den to watch TV before bed. If she dons a frilly nightgown and slips seductively into his bedroom aroused with high expectations, he looks up from his golf magazine and asks “What?” They haven’t had sex since Dr. Phil was born. The big excitement is a subscription to one of those new digital cable deals with all of those extra channels and still nothing worth watching. After three decades of boredom, Kay is, to put it mildly, underappreciated—like Meryl Streep without a fake nose or a foreign accent.

“You marry who you marry—you are who you are—it doesn’t change,” says her friend (Jean Smart) but Kay is tired of constant rejection and terminal ennui. One day at the mall, she dons her reading glasses, browses the “How To” shelves at Barnes and Noble, and buys a book called You Can Have the Marriage You Want, by a relationship expert named Dr. Bernard Feld, who runs a camp for intensive couples counseling in Hope Springs, Maine. Optimistic, she withdraws money from her personal savings, plunks down $4,000 on the Internet, and signs up for a week of therapy. Arnold is so appalled by the cost that he refuses to go, but when the morning of departure arrives and he watches her heading for the airport with her suitcase packed, he relents and grudgingly follows. The rest of the movie shows, carefully and without contrivance, what happens when two decent people risk humiliation and pain to explore their inner feelings long enough to redeem what they’ve sacrificed through age and tedium. She wants to restore lost intimacy to her marriage. He just wants to get his money back and go home. Charm eludes him. Challenged and annoyed by even the price of tuna in a local homespun country café, Arnold is the kind of curmudgeon who has seen entirely too many Woody Allen movies, but as the memories come out in his counseling sessions, his sweetness emerges. (When they fell in love in college, he hid her engagement ring in a cinnamon bun.) Learning to touch again, his awkwardness is slow and tender-hearted and her joy is fragile but palpable.

The pristine beauty and pastoral ambience of the charming coastal Maine village of Hope Springs (played by the whitewashed colonialism of Stonington, Conn.) is a cure for anything that ails you, and by the time Kay and Arnold reach the next step in their homework assignments—to explore their sexual history—the setting has become a relaxing contrast to the embarrassing facts they uncover about orgasms, fantasies and erectile dysfunction. “I was never comfortable with oral sex,” Kay tells Dr. Feld (Steve Carell, underplaying with moderation and compassion). “With giving or receiving?” he counters. The expression on Meryl Streep’s face when she looks astounded and asks, “Huh?” has got to be seen to be enjoyed to the max. Trying at last to revive the horny days of youth, Arnold orchestrates an evening in an elegant colonial inn with champagne and chocolate-dipped strawberries that turns poignant when lovemaking wears thin, like an old quilt. Nothing is hackneyed and everything is unpredictable in the assured direction by David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada) and the intelligent screenplay by Vanessa Taylor, making her feature film debut after writing and producing such above-average TV shows as Game of Thrones and Everwood. The camerawork is clean and captivating without a lot of visual wows, allowing the actors plenty of room to relate in a completely natural style.

They know what they’re doing, but there is no question Hope Springs would not be the revelation it is without two stars of impeccable magnitude. Meryl Streep is her usual reliable self—alert, committed, analytical, making every minute count. But it is really Tommy Lee Jones who surprises and thrills, matching his co-star moment by moment, scene by scene. I’ve never seen him so truly involved. Even in the gruff cactus and sage sagas set in his native Texas, he is never less than mesmerizing. But he seems genuinely inspired partnering an artist with real craft. With exasperated groans, hunched shoulders and graying hair, his Arnold is impatient and irritating, but sensitive and manly, with a total grasp of the nuances of comedy. Amazingly, he looks furtively through the corners of his eyes with a poker face, like a kid caught with his finger in the cherry pie before it reaches the table, and I dare you not to laugh out loud. He hasn’t had a role like this in years, and he is thoroughly flawless.

Without giving anything away, Hope Springs ends with a coda that arrives too abruptly and resolves its loose ends a bit too neatly, but that doesn’t dilute the impact. I think everything about the movie is too subtle and real to appeal to the Batman demographic, but for mature audiences who have forgotten how to smile, it takes up where The Best
Exotic Marigold Hotel left off.

rreed@observer.com

HOPE SPRINGS

Running Time 100 minutes

Written by Vanessa Taylor

Directed by David Frankel

Starring Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones and Steve Carell

3.5/4