(Note: There was a typo in the title of the original post, a missing "e" in "People" and "t" in "that", causing a mismatch between title and url.)
Friday, July 06, 2012
"People Like Us": the family secrets that explode when an estate is settled
“People Like Us”, directed by Alex Kurtzman and (like “The
Help”) produced and distributed by the recent alliance of Touchstone and
Dreamworks, comes across like a 50s Douglas Sirk family drama, but with a lot
more urgency, hyperbole, and quick pacing (a requirement in the commercial
screenwriting world today) than is
really believable.
Sam (Chris Pine) plays an aggressive commodity salesman, who
works in an obscure area of commercial
barter. I’m not familiar with it, but it
reminds me of “cash flow management”. He
certainly follows the sales cultural dictum of “always be closing”. While bragging about his latest deal, his
boss informs him that the FTC is after him when a deal resulted in a physical
transportation disaster, and that he could be liable personally. (I don’t know if this world really works that
way.) When he gets home, his girlfriend (Olivia Wilde) tells him that his
estranged father died.
Sam even plants a "nightmare" ruse not to make the flight from NY to LA,
but his girlfriend finds his “misplaced” ID.
When he arrives, he deals with an angry mother Lillian (Michelle
Pfeiffer), and an entire record empire left by the mysterious deceased
man. The dad's lawyer meets him, tells him he
inherited only his father’s vinyl record collection, and gets a mysterious
handbag filled with $150000 in cash, to be delivered to a half-sister Frankie
(Elizabeth Banks) whom he never had known he had.
His mother explains that she had known about the love child,
and forced the mogul to “choose”. Lillian insists that Sam is an only child, and
should have no responsibility for this “sister”. The father had abandoned the
girl completely (essentially a deadbeat dad, at the behest of his wife), as she grew up to become a single mom, going to AA meetings, raising
a bright but troubled middle school kid
Josh (Michael Hall d’Addorio). There’s
an early scene where Josh throws some sodium he had stolen from a chemistry lab
into the school natatorium. Remember that experiment in high school? When the school tries to expel Josh and
pursue Frankie, she threatens to sue back for giving him the knowledge of how
to do it. (Well, then, schools couldn’t
teach chemistry, could they? This is
litigiousness as far as it goes.)
Sam, because of his own legal and financial troubles, is tempted to keep the
money (dishonestly). But he starts hanging around
Frankie and growing closer to the kid as an uncle, while keeping the secret
from Frankie. Unbeknownst to him, the
lawyer (Philip Baker Hall) eventually calls her and tells her about the money,
setting up a final confrontation.
Without saying too much more, it’s hard to see how Sam will
be in the clear from all the trouble he’s in. “We are family” becomes his
excuse. People get tempted. People make
mistakes. For some of us, that's not enough.
But dramas about wills and estates always give writers a
chance to pose some novel problems about hidden secrets and unexpected family
responsibility. And this film does pose a new wrinkle.
The film reminds me of a little film by Hilary Birmingham
that I saw at a festival in Minneapolis in 2002, “The Truth About Tully”, about
secrets in a Nebraska farm family. Other apt comparisons come from "One True Thing" and "Raising Helen".
The official site is here It.will use Shockwave.
(Note: There was a typo in the title of the original post, a missing "e" in "People" and "t" in "that", causing a mismatch between title and url.)
(Note: There was a typo in the title of the original post, a missing "e" in "People" and "t" in "that", causing a mismatch between title and url.)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment