I was absolutely stunned that this was not an adaptation of a play since this film feels like the most ‘well made play on film’ I think I have ever seen. It is very, very written, to an often leaden degree, and it’s rising and falling conflicts feel as predictive in their rhythms as the beeps of the ECG machine that the ailing father is hooked up to.
The saving grace is that it is really well performed (particularly by…
Marielle Heller is amongst my favourite contemporary American directors (Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can you Ever Forgive Me? and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood are 3/3 for me) but this is her weakest movie.
The hook of the film (woman turns into a dog) goes, narratively, absolutely nowhere and feels more like a non-committal bait and switch to talk about its thematics. However the film is best when showing the frustrations and tenderness of motherhood and parenting in a way that I hadn’t seen as well realised before. The child is also really well directed!
Weekend at Bernie’s is not a great film despite the cool argument that it is a searing satire of the materialism of the 80s and arrives in 89 to stare more clearly back at the preceding decade.
The film (minus Bernie) is not that good. Risible characters as leads and the lighting and video quality are cheap (the budget clearly was actually spent on building Bernie Lomax’s modernist beachfront palace in North Carolina for the shoot) and the film sags whenever…
