The Face of Love

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Loved it. Two living but dead people. Both with secrets and deceptions. Which deception is the bigger? Hers that his eerie resemblance to her late husband initially attracts her? Or his, the fact that he doesn't have long to live - a "bad ticker", and that any relationship he has will have a sad outcome? In the end, this strange relationship allows her to move on from her loss and mourning...somehow putting the ghost of her husband and also the anger that she had toward him for dying to rest. For Tom, who by the way never reveals his secret, he has found his Muse. She resurrects his art...for ten years he never painted, but once again this has sparked a plethora of great art from his hand. What is life about in essence? Being fully alive... I loved the background scenery....upscale but still remember this is a fantastical type of tale...and it's just staging. Pay attention to the message. Certainly enjoyed this film. The actors were great as usual.

Beautiful, grieving middle-aged widow, whose loving, devoted husband recently drowned, recalls blissful times together while gazing out over the ocean in her backyard...jump ahead five whole years, and she's still thinking about him. She tells her grown daughter that she doesn't like "looking back", and then immediately visits the museum where she and her husband spent a great deal of time hugging in front of the art. Screenwriters Arie Posin, who also directed, and Matthew McDuffie give our heroine (played with her usual pluck and vulnerability by Annette Bening) a plush job decorating houses for sale, a gorgeous home by the Pacific (designed by her late husband and filled with his art purchases), a healthy daughter to touch bases with, not to mention genteel, lovestruck widower Robin Williams as her neighbor! By the time Bening meets and begins dating a divorced art teacher who is a lookalike for her deceased husband (both played by Ed Harris), it all seems like too much. Because warm yet tentative Bening plays the central character, we are, presumably, supposed to feel for her widow automatically; however, not even this talented actress can breathe life into such stale scenes as a first kiss in a restaurant that causes her to panic and rush off to the ladies room. This is Harlequin Romance stuff, and what these wonderful actors saw in the tepid screenplay, loaded with uneasy conversations and clumsy exposition, is simply not clear. The sequence where the woman talks to her husband's double for the first time (in his classroom) and starts crying uncontrollably is an intriguing starting point for dramatic material, but McDuffie and Posin are too schematic. Their picture is a mechanical, infuriating valentine. *1/2 from ****

Overall I loved this movie. Annette Bening is so poised and a natural who makes the story believable. Ed Harris does a decent job as well. For the most part it is a drama but there were some funny parts in it too. Yes the story is a bit far-fetched but for me it worked and it left me thinking which is always a good thing. There are themes of love, loss, grief, healing, second chances and renewal of lost passion. Loved the house she lived in! The use of artistry served as a wonderful backdrop for their relationship. I watched this twice and really enjoyed it. So good to see Annette Bening again! I wish she made more movies. Give this movie a chance. My mom liked it too.

I kind of hated this movie. As it progressed, it seemed to be heading toward a sort of Hitchcockian, creepy tale. But then it just . . . wasn't. Nikki was a terrible person in many ways. Yes, her husband died, but she then exploited this poor man who had his own identity and his own pain. Had the movie taken Nikki to a truly obsessive place, I would have been on board--but it didn't. Except for one brief moment, it stopped short of that path. And so it didn't work; the only pay-off for the awful treatment of Tom would have been our fascination with Nikki's deranged obsession, and we didn't get that pay-off. And worse, the final scene shows Nikki glorying in the experience, apparently relishing the brief, warped love affair with Tom. Again, had she been fully disturbed, it would have been a wonderfully appalling moment. But the movie didn't go that far; she was simply a sad, lonely woman. And so in that last moment, she's a sad, lonely, selfish woman who ignores another person's humanity. Oh, and Robin Williams? Is simply terrible in this film. I like him, and I like his serious roles; he was great in One Hour Photo. But the dialogue here is so stilted and false, and so inappropriate for him, that he comes across as a total amateur--which of course he is not. Still, I love me some Ed Harris--sexy, aging men rock. And Annette Bening is fabulous, too. Too bad they're in a sucky movie.

The Face of Love (2013) There is a terrific movie in here somewhere, but it misses on several subtle points here and there and ends up being good, totally watchable, and a nice view on Ed Harris (as Tom) and Annette Bening (as Nikki), the leading actors. At its best, the movie dug into the nature of mourning and loss, and in love. The two main actors were struggling with losses, each, and ran into each other and some confused sparks flew. But the hook to the movie, and the problem really, is a quirk. Nikki sees Tom and he looks exactly like her dead husband (Garrett). So she has a weird attachment to him, and leads him on (a little like Vertigo in the second half). It's a fun idea, but it doesn't quite fly. So really the movie follows this couple in their 50s falling in love. With the constant worry that the woman's psychosis will screw things up. You'll have to see. Warm, with perturbations. Oh, and Robins Williams has one of his last roles here. He's nice and sympathetic, and maybe not quite enough for the role, which is the third leg to the whole thing in theory.

As a huge fan of director Arie Posin's misunderstood and underrated look at suburbia in his 2005 debut film The Chumscrubber, it was with great anticipation I awaited his long gestating follow up which turned out to be this slice of middle aged romance The Face of Love (or the Look of Love in some countries). The cast looked good, the story seemed intriguing and even though the initial reaction to this film was lukewarm at best I still held out hope that the promise Posin showed on debut would come to the forefront, sadly this was not to be the case. The Face of Love is a hapless film, a groan inducing amateurishly written tale of love and loss that suffers the rare feat of growing worse and worse as the dire dialogue and story line unfolds one after the other. It's actually quiet embarrassing to sit back and witness the silly story take full effect and the actors of such experienced calibre like Annette Benning, Ed Harris and even the late Robin Williams (in a turn obviously taken during his financial troubles) struggle to make the film work. Benning in particular looks utterly lost in her role as grieving widow Nikki, she's given most of the films worst lines and scenes but to say even the reliable Ed Harris succeeds would be a lie as the actor also gets lost further and further into a character that was never going to work. With a lack of solid direction, badly directed acting turns and a terrible script it's like Posin has taken a step back in all areas from The Chumscrubber. The Chumscrubber was often inventive, satirically smart and featured an abundance of neat acting turns (bar the always horrible Camilla Belle) which all fail to eventuate here. Posin was clearly passionate about his follow up project, reading about the film it's easy to see that it was not an easy sell and at the heart of proceedings there is an undeniably intriguing story to tell but in the final product there is no real heart and soul, it's a cold picture where it should have been full of human emotion and care. We never wholeheartedly feel the love Nikki feels for Garret and his doppelganger Tom and romantic moments between the lovers always feels forced and eerily creepy. It's almost like the film turned into a voyeuristic nightmare where we should have been engaged in an emotionally charged love. Without question one of the year's worst films and a major disappointment for those like me that thought Posin was a talent to watch. Face of Love is an embarrassment for all those involved and a showcase for how not to produce a potentially effective screen story. Hard to watch for all the wrong reasons, Face of Love neither inspires, affects nor intrigues, yet does make you wish the horrors on screen would stop for the love of all things decent! Half a desperate neighbour out of 5 For more movie reviews and opinions check out - www.jordanandeddie.wordpress.com