‘ Love’ really gets to know people you don’t want to know
It is one thing to spend a lot of time with people who get under your skin when those people are family. It is quite another to pay for the privilege with strangers.
“Love After Love” captures a family adrift in the banality of grief following the death of its patriarch. Those left behind snipe at each other, lie, cheat, get fall- down drunk, end relationships and muddle their way through in the messiest way possible to some promised other side. But the ways in which “Love After Love” is successful at portraying the grief process are also what make it at times wildly unpleasant to watch.
The death is a protracted and miserable one, a terminal illness ugly with indignity. Each family member processes the passing in his or her own form of misery. Mother Suzanne ( Andie MacDowell) plunges herself back into work too soon, and back into romance, striking up a relationship with a man with a teenage son.
Suzanne’s own grown sons are none too thrilled with how quickly she seems to have moved on, but they’re dealing with their grief with even less grace. Nicholas ( Chris O’Dowd) lobs grenades into his relationships with reckless abandon, ending a long- term romance with almost gleeful cruelty to begin another with a young actress, whom he will inevitably also hurt. His brother Chris ( James Adomian) internalizes his pain and tries to drown it in a bottle.
Director and co- writer Russell Harbaugh smartly mirrors technique to character. It’s a film intentionally adrift, rambling between a loose succession of family gatherings and dinner parties with subdued style, the camera feeling like just another person at the edge of the room. The film is so conversational it almost feels unscripted, and the viewer gleans just enough information from ambient dialogue and context clues.
It’s an audacious technique hobbled by unsympathetic characters. MacDowell plays her part with complicated grace, but her sons are unsalvageable, intolerable man- children. None of O’Dowd’s considerable latent charm is on display in Nicholas, an angry caged monkey flinging his own mess at everyone nearby. One longs for comeuppance or revelation, but “Love After Love” is not that kind of film. Plot is as untidy as life, and consequences crumble like so much ash in a crematorium.
The film opens in the middle of a conversation. Suzanne has just asked Nicholas if he’s happy, and he’s too baffled by the concept to know how to respond. Were she to ask again in the final scene, one might suppose he’d answer differently. But one also might not care.