This film had the potential to be a slight, but pleasant little comic gem. It has Jane Fonda hysterically parodying a stereotype of herself: she claims to prophetically dream, her basement's filled with pot, and she dances howling under every full moon. And it showcases promising young Nat Wolff's potentially star-making comedic turn as Fonda's awkward grandson. The plot revolves around the reunion of conservative and uptight Diane (free-spirited Catherine Keener in a horrible case of mis-casting) and her hippie mother Grace (Fonda) after twenty years of estrangement. After her divorce, Diane packs up the kids and heads to Grandma's place in Woodstock to escape the reality of her pain.
The film's problems, there are many, center around the film's indecision on its view of Grace. It starts off by satirizing, parodying, and generally making fun of her free-love hippie lifestyle, but then it comes to embrace it -making her philosophies on life the film's guiding principles and standards for morality. By the movie's end we are no longer expected to be laughing at her, but nodding our heads in assent at her words of home-grown (just like her pot) wisdom. The Men Who Stare At Goats suffered from this same perspective shift: first laughing at its characters, then embracing the very attributes that it prompted us to laugh at them for possessing. Strongly written characters, and a plot so ludicrous that even if we came to believe in it, it was by suspending our disbelief for the movie's sake were that film's salvation. Peace, Love, and Misunderstanding has none though. Its ideology is based in reality and it wants the audience to genuinely buy it, not just for the sake of the film.
Its other problems generally related to lapses in reality (much like, but not to the extent of one of last year's festival entries: Samuel Bleak): If you have money and thusly options, why go somewhere you claim you don't want to be? Unless, you really want to be there... in which case, why were you distanced from it for twenty whole years? Upon arriving there, did you really think that you would get to set rules? If the area's customs bother you, why participate? And if you don't want to spend time with someone, go away; why spend time with them doing the things you said you didn't want to do in the first place? Questions like this plagued me for the duration of Peace, Love, and Misunderstanding, during which I had no peace, witnessed movie-cliches of love, but solidly experienced misunderstanding.
Check back soon for my reviews on yesterday's movies:
Monsieur Lehzar * * * * (my first four-star review of the festival)!
You just don't understand because you're young!
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