A must-watch timeless piece.
When I saw the movie’s billboard I was not too drawn to it. After Glenn Close won the Golden Globe, I was curious. A friend had told me it was a rather slow movie, and that she was annoyed the whole time. I was afraid to be annoyed at the slow pace of the movie until I understood what she meant. The Film Post said it perfectly, the movie really is a “ticking time-bomb of simmering tension”.
This is a movie every person in a relationship should watch. A movie that should be discussed within a couple and within eachself. What are you compromising? Why are you compromising? Are you willing to compromise any further? Glenn Close said in interviews that she only ‘unlocked’ the character after she could ‘understand’ why her character, Joan, didn’t leave her husband Joe. It is a portrait of a very complex relationship, where one must pay close attention not to see it as a bad-guy/poor-woman situation, and the complexity comes exactly from the fact that much arose from Joan’s decisions.
Although I found it not too unpredictable, the beauty of this movie is that it doesn’t matter if you uncover some of the story, the acting from Glenn Close is amazing and it keeps you completely glued to the screen. Her real-life daughter, who plays her character in a young age, also has an incredible acting in my opinion.
Favourite scenes: When he says she doesn’t write to the Physics Nobel Laureate. In the final scene, when he throws at her that he was making her coffee and taking care of the kids. The scene when they argue as young, when she has corrections for his draft. And only noticed after watching the trailer after the movie, when in the taxi she says that everyone needs approval.
The soundtrack is also very good. While I was in my post-movie-obsession phase, I watched several interviews and the cast and director underline the importance of the filming on set being organic. They studied and discussed everything to the detail before so that on set it would be just “Go”. And both Glenn Close and Johnathan Pryce credit a lot both the director and his wife who is the editor, for their sensibility for close-ups. Glenn Close says everything without needing many words.
A movie I will want to watch twice. Definitely a great movie to be the first I watched in 2019.