Heights
Issue #24
Directed by Chris Terrio
By Rebecca Flint-Marx
Published: June 1st, 2005 | 4:20pm
What do you get when you combine a bunch of pretty white people with vaguely interesting lives, a lavish West Village apartment, a surfeit of good intentions, and Glenn Close? In this case, you get Heights, a gorgeously shot but frustratingly leaden jumble of narratives about, yes, a group of New Yorkers grappling with love, betrayal, and angst. Yes, we’ve seen this before, and yes, we’ve seen it done better. But you can’t blame Chris Terrio for wanting to try. The first-time feature director obviously had plenty of good intentions in his conception of an intimate, character-driven film set in what the film’s production notes repeatedly call “a post-9/11 New York.”
Heights centers primarily on Isabel (Elizabeth Banks), a young photographer adrift both professionally and romantically. Her fiancé, played by the ever-callow James Marsden, is a lawyer with a secret. Who wouldn’t have second thoughts about a lawyer with a secret? Certainly not Glenn Close, who plays Isabel’s fire-breathing mother, Diana, a renowned actress who is flamboyant with a capital “F.”
Early in the film, Diana takes a carnivorous interest in Alec (Jesse Bradford), a young actor auditioning for a role in her play. Alec, naturally, is Isabel’s neighbor. Added to the mix is a British journalist who is trying to get in touch with the former lovers of a renowned gay photographer. (This plot device, incidentally, provides the film’s highlight, a cameo by Rufus Wainwright as a jilted ex.) All of this comes to a sort of flabby climax at a big party held in Diana’s gorgeous West Village apartment.
Heights takes place over the course of a single day that seems more like five. Characters mope, make bold declarations, do implausible things, and never engage fully enough with the audience to warrant our concern. What’s more, they do so in such a contrived, tired fashion that it’s hard to believe their limbs aren’t attached to marionette strings. We’re supposed to be drawn into the hopes and sadness of these people, whose emptiness is mirrored in numerous shots of the hole in the downtown skyline. Unfortunately, it’s just the emptiness that resonates.
Comments
Please login to be able to comment on this article.
more