‘Landline’ dials up the ’90s family dramedy Patrick Ryan
A look into hows an affair brings together and rips apart a family
Do you ever get nostalgic for the days when a floppy disk could ruin a marriage?
If so, Landline is the ’90s-set dramedy you’ve been calling for. The movie (in theaters Friday in New York and Los Angeles, expands to 12 cities July 28, including Chicago, Phoenix and Miami) picks up with sisters Dana (Jenny Slate) and Ali (Abby Quinn) when they discover that their father (John Turturro) is having an affair via amorous love letters on his desktop computer. The coming-of-age film co-stars Edie Falco and Jay Duplass, and reunites Slate with the team behind 2014’s Obvious Child, in which she played a stand-up comedian who gets an abortion.
USA TODAY caught up with Slate and Landline director/ co-writer Gillian Robespierre at Sundance Film Festival to discuss their latest:
Q How
long have you been wanting to tell a story like this about a family? You touch on that in Obvious Child — with the strained relationship between Donna (Slate) and her mother (Polly Draper) — but this is much more of an ensemble piece.
ROBESPIERRE: We weren’t done yet with the story of what a family looks like. After Obvious Child, everyone was asking, “What’s next?” and that’s such a scary and annoying question, because sometimes, nothing is next. We just started thinking about a family that’s brought together by divorce. (Co-writer Elisabeth Holm) and I both come from families of divorce. We were both 16 when it happened, and that’s a very pivotal moment in your life as you’re trying to stake out your independence, but you’re still very much a child. It started with our families, but it kind of became something else.
Q Is there something specific about that divorced family dynamic that you wanted to capture?
Liz and I wanted to ROBESPIERRE: flip the divorce narrative on its ( butt) a little bit, and make sure that the family was brought together and torn apart through the process. We also didn’t want the cheater to be a villain or the cheated-on to be a victim. There are hopefully moments where you (sympathize with) them, because monogamy is so tough and it isn’t right for everybody. It’s messy and sometimes unattainable.
Q Both
Donna ( Obvious Child) and Dana ( Landline) struggle with commitment and letting themselves be vulnerable. Do you see any other common threads between the two?
They’re both very intelliSLATE: gent, but they’re different in their wants. I think it was easier for me to accept Dana, because she has a lot of rules for herself. Donna doesn’t have much of a filter, lives a fun lifestyle ... but I think someone like Dana — who clearly has a lot of energy within her and has put herself into a smaller identity form — is much more mysterious to me. She clearly has something busting out.
Q You
wanted to make sure the ’90s setting was subtle and not too nostalgia-heavy. But is there anything from that era that you absolutely knew this movie needed to have?
ROBESPIERRE: The bedspreads, the wall-to-wall carpeting, the blue Volvo — all those things were in there. (But we didn’t want) to go over the top with the aesthetics of the ’90s; we didn’t want it to be a ’90s music video.
I didn’t think my “Did I do SLATE: that?” Urkel (impression) made it into this film, but it did.