Light-hearted = lightweight material

THE familiar tribulations of wealthy white New Yorkers become the target of half-hearted, selfregarding social commentary in The Longest Week, a blithely derivative rom-com that isn’t without a certain smug charm.

A frequent, insufferably omniscient voiceover (Pine) introduces luxury hotel heir Conrad Valmont (Bateman,

pictured), who’s pushing 40 and avocationally unemployed his entire life.

Valmont experiences an unwelcome wake-up call, however, when he’s unceremoniously cut off by his divorcing parents and summarily evicted from New York’s Hotel Valmont, where he’s lived for decades.

With his expense accounts frozen, he’s forced to move in with his well-off painter friend Dylan (Crudup), although he keeps his precarious financial status to himself, explaining rather that his hotel suite is under renovation.

Dylan immediately begins enthusing about Beatrice (Wilde), an attractive young debutante and model with a taste for Victorian literature whom he’s recently met.

When he’s introduced to Beatrice, Conrad realises she’s the same mysterious woman he met on the subway a day previously who gave him her phone number.

Although he promises Dylan not to interfere with his friend’s pursuit of Beatrice, Conrad sets up a date with her anyway and they quickly become lovers. When Dylan discovers this betrayal, he naturally kicks Conrad out of his place.

Now homeless, he moves in with Beatrice, who’s still unaware that his parents have disinherited him. It won’t be long before this is also exposed and Conrad will face a reckoning that may finally force him to take responsibility for his rather inconsequential life. Writer-director Peter Glanz’s A

Relationship in Four Days, a short film selection at Sundance and Cannes, serves as the basis for his debut feature, which liberally references the work of various auteurs ranging from Godard to Woody Allen.

Valmont similarly aspires to follow in the steps of highly regarded novelists, but since he’s lazy and not particularly talented, his book project has been languishing for a decade.

Bateman readily grasps the minor conflicts inherent in Valmont’s louche lifestyle, but he’s less successful at articulating his major life crises.

In part this is due to Glanz’s preference for consigning major plot and character developments to the narrator for novelistic voiceover description, so that these key story points often transpire offscreen or during insignificant transitional scenes.

Styled like a New York version of Anna Karina, Wilde would fare better if the film were a more evenhanded two-hander, but caught between the affections of competing men with very similar characteristics, Beatrice remains incompletely articulated.

Crudup’s Dylan could also have benefited from clearer delineation and more definitive conflicts with Valmont to achieve a degree of character differentiation that’s often lacking.

As either romantic comedy or late-life coming-of-age material, the film’s arc falls short of the transformative experiences typical of these genres, although Glanz’s mildly amusing tone remains appealingly lighthearted throughout. – Hollywood Reporter

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