Crucial scenes fail to ring true
Film has a clever setup, but falls in its delivery
Just when you thought mumblecore was dead, Duplass Brothers Productions comes roaring back ( but quietly — rustling back) with another low- key, barely- featurelength comedy designed to push our collective envelope of edginess and prudery.
In 2009, Mark Duplass starred in Humpday, a comedy about two straight men who decide to have sex on film as an art project. In 2010, Mark and brother Jay directed Cyrus, about an adult with an uncomfortably close attachment to his mother.
The Overnight feels a bit like these — certainly the whiff of inappropriate sexual attraction is there in the story of straitlaced parents Alex and Emily ( Adam Scott, Taylor Schilling), newly arrived in Los Angeles, who accept a dinner invitation from a cool dad they met.
Kurt ( Jason Schwartzman) gives off a weird vibe that most of us have come across before. Voluble, jokey and opinionated, he might just be Alex and Emily’s new best friend. Or he might merely prove to be a useful source of information on neighbourhood schools. Or he might reveal some secret desire to sell them a time share. Or he might be worse than that.
Audiences will find out which when Alex and Emily show up at Kurt’s palatial residence, which contains ( in no particular order) a clothing- optional swimming pool, a well- stocked kitchen, an art studio filled with the kind of paintings Georgia O’Keeffe might have knocked off is she’d been a dude, and Kurt’s sexy French wife, Charlotte, played by Judith Godreche. Charlotte is an actress, sort of.
Alex and Emily ( but especially Alex) are desperate not to come across as too square, and make polite noises when Kurt describes his water- filtration business, and again when he brings out a DVD of his wife’s work.
Early in the evening, the kids — each couple has a boy of about eight — are put to bed upstairs as the adults move from basic chitchat into more personal and risky realms of conversation.
Writer- director Patrick Brice does a good job of keeping us in Alex and Emily’s heads, and out of Kurt and Charlotte’s, who remain something of a mystery even unto the final scenes. But it’s at this point that the over-cranked narrative starts to show signs of stress. We may be able to believe that Kurt’s invention can make pee potable, or even that someone of U. S. birth might allow himself to say “Frawnce” instead of “Frantz” when referring to Charlotte’s homeland.
But the film promises more than it can ultimately deliver. Brice’s screenplay, clever and occasionally funny and sometimes even shocking across the film’s first hour, can’t quite bring the picture home, with the result that some of the climactic scenes don’t ring true. It’s the tyranny of high expectation, and it can strike just as easily in a movie as at a dinner party.
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