‘Lovers’: light but lethal sex comedy
In The Lovers, a sly but forgiving sex comedy by Azazel Jacobs, Debra Winger and Tracy Letts play a couple trapped in a marriage as drab as the dun-coloured walls of their nondescript suburban house.
Their characters, Mary and Michael, never argue or come to psychodramatic blows. They’re too exhausted for that. Instead, they engage in the kind of kitchen-table politesse that passes for communication among the empty-nested and attenuated. They keep calm. They soldier on. They remember to buy more toothpaste.
Except, as the movie opens, the status quo is in danger of coming undone. And what ensues is the kind of bedroom farce that filmmakers such as Ernst Lubitsch and Woody Allen have made so simultaneously light and lethal. A roundelay of ruptures, reconciliations and recapitulations, The Lovers plays with slippery notions of fidelity, turning them inside out to reveal either the truth or hypocrisy underneath.
Anchored by vivid and masterfully calibrated performances from Winger and Letts, and sent aloft by a lilting orchestral score that infuses the most everyday banalities with big, melodramatic emotions, the movie is a tarnished ode to ageing, compromise and new beginnings. Jacobs, who made the equally observant Momma’s Man and Terri, resists the urge to woo the audience with reassuring lies.
Here, the filmmaker evinces a particular gift for staging, composition and framing, presenting Mary and Michael in their personal and professional habitats (the latter of which are interchangeably blah) with elegant discretion and tact. There are some bracing sequences of physical comedy, such as when Winger and Letts bring wine glasses to their lips at precisely the same moment, or when Michael engages in elaborate pantomime in an office parking lot while carrying on a deception over his phone.
It bears noting that two other characters come into play: a spiky, neurotic dance instructor named Lucy (played by Melora Walters in her finest performance since Magnolia) and a handsome Irishman named Robert (Aidan Gillen). The question of whether and how these four will come together, stay together, collide or stay in the corners of their respective wounded psyches propels the suspense of The Lovers and ultimately sends the married protagonists in directions that few will see coming.
There are so many reasons to value The Lovers, chief among them the showcase it provides Winger, who at 61 proves every bit as authentic and earthily seductive as she was when she became a huge star 35 years ago. For his part, Letts brings his now-signature brand of presentness to a role that may seem softer and more vulnerable than usual.
As a rare romantic comedy featuring actors who resemble real people, The Lovers combines otherwise contradictory values of realism and fantasy with incisive honesty and relaxed, unforced grace. Jacobs isn’t as interested in whether this marriage can be saved as whether it should be. In a movie as alert to the nuances of low-key misery as it is to moments of sudden, unguarded tenderness, the answer is tantalisingly elusive up to the very end.
Flustered, flirty and filled to the brim with compassion, The Lovers is charming, even when it’s proving how hollow charm can be. – Washington Post