Bruce Beresford, the Aussie director behind such gems as Breaker Morant and Tender Mercies, has become only the latest director of commercial cinema who has been relegated to indiedom – in turn suffering the limited distribution and paucity of TV ads that accompany the transition.
But unlike a Jonathan Demme or William Friedkin, whose art has become too renegade for the vanilla confines of the major studios, Beresford’s craft hasn’t changed much since his treacly, inexplicable Oscar winner Driving Miss Daisy. His recent films — Mao’s Last Dancer and now Peace, Love and Misunderstanding — remain as studio-safe as ever, independent not out of recklessness but because they’re simply too substandard to open on a thousand screens.
To paraphrase the Nick Lowe song that inspired the movie’s title, there’s not much funny about Peace, Love and Misunderstanding, a corny ensemble rom-com about sociopolitical culture clash and a family’s buried skeletons. Catherine Keener, in one of her rare misfires, stars as Diane, a conservative lawyer in New York City who flees to her mother’s house to emotionally convalesce after her husband Michael (Kyle MacLachlan) asks for a divorce. She brings along her two teenage children, Zoe and Jake (Elizabeth Olsen and Nat Wolff), who will be meeting their grandmother for the first time; Diane hasn’t even seen her mother in 20 years, still seething inside from a fractious fall-out.
The matriarch, Grace, lives in a pot-hazy commune in Woodstock (where else?), where chickens roam in the living room and barely clothed stoners and antiwar activists congregate at parties. Grace is played Jane Fonda in a move of squarish, unimaginative inevitability. In press interviews, Fonda has gone out of her way to say that she was never a hippie, but the caricature that screenwriters Joseph Muszynski and Christina Mengert have written her to be makes an obvious mockery of her Hanoi Jane history of activism and cultural liberalism.
Fonda’s aging flower child, forever preserving a hippie ethos long extinguished, is both a laughingstock for the right-wingers of today — there’s a ridiculous, head-shaking scene of a drum circle around a bonfire, where Grace and her friends begin sentences with stuff like, “When I met the Dalai Lama…” — as well as a purveyor of apparently sage advice. As her name suggests, Grace is pure goodness, speaking in eye-rolling spiritual aphorisms. She’s a bottomless dispensary of worldly knowledge, but she’s never believable as anything other than a fantasy concocted by writers who just saw a History Channel documentary about the ’60s.
Keener’s Diane doesn’t have things very much better, subjected to going through the motions of a formula romance with Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s scruffy craftsman. The movie also devotes screen time to Diane’s offspring, both of whom magically find romance in the patchouli-scented museum piece in which the film is set. Nerdy Jack meets a potential mate while filming his Woodstock adventure for an amateur documentary. Zoe, a Whitman-reading vegan, goes all gooey-eyed for the town’s model-attractive butcher (Chace Crawford). That’s right: an animal activist and a man who slices apart animals for a living must put aside their differences and blah, blah, blah. Meat is murder, but he’s so hot!
To its credit, the film contains some clever dialogue, most of it granted to Elizabeth Olsen, who delivers it well. She refers to her mother’s law firm as “Fascist, Fascist and Fascist,” displaying a sense of rogue individualism that better defined what Fonda was actually all about in the turbulent ’60s. But these are small examples of impressive brush strokes on an awfully bland canvas.
By the third or fourth time Beresford shows us a chicken walking in the foreground of an interior shot for yet another cheap laugh, you realize that this picture has nothing to say.
PEACE, LOVE AND MISUNDERSTANDING. Director: Bruce Beresford; Cast: Catherine Keener, Jane Fonda, Elizabeth Olsen, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Nat Wolff, Chace Crawford, Marissa O’Donnell, Kyle MacLachlan, Rosanne Arquette, Katharine McPhee; Distributor: IFC; Rating: R; Now playing at Coral Gables Art Cinema, 260 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables; opens Friday at Living Room Theaters at FAU, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton