![]() In “Destination Wedding,” Levin at least tries to craft a distinctive approach to a sex scene, but the result, instead of avoiding the subgenre’s pitfalls, lands in the worst of them while also inventing new disasters of its own. If they’re of any merit at all, they do more than illustrate the plot point that characters are having a sexual relationship the good ones convey an idea about character, or, for that matter, about sex itself, and are conspicuously stylized, shifted away from both illustration and titillation. Actors shouldn’t be asked to do them, at least, not in any realistic fashion. Sex scenes are the bane of the modern cinema. As they flee, Lindsay tumbles down a hill Frank comes to her aid, kisses her, and-after she pushes him away, he apologizes, and she leaps ahead to kiss him-they decide to have sex. Frank (in an all-too-conventional touch) fends it off with an intentional bit of chivalry that he then apostrophizes at length. Wandering through the wild landscape, Lindsay and Frank find themselves facing a mountain lion. The height of empty and cringe-inducing contrivance is a scene that’s intrinsically difficult to film: a sex scene. It’s a good, true, classic subject-but one that draws its force from specifics, and it’s specifics that Levin doesn’t know how to write. Levin neither accepts nor grants his actors the risk of his setup.Įven more disheartening is the script itself, which consists of a series of rapid-fire riffs that revolve with a narrow dramatic insistence on the movie’s main idea, the possibility of pursuing romance and accepting love despite emotional wounds. Rather than emphasizing the tightrope audacity of the performers’ lengthy dialogue, he films the performances like protracted versions of more or less any conventional dialogue scene, intercut to trim out slip-ups and clean up the dialogue. He creates a middling and vague proscenium, a set of virtual theatre frames in which they can stand (or, for the most part, sit) and deliver their lines, but even that series of frames is wan and familiar. ![]() Which is to say that, in a classic-movie sense, there’s almost no action the film rises or falls on the nature and the quality of its talk.īut Levin films the actors talking with no visual imagination or intimacy whatsoever, as if his great (and apt) respect for their talent led him to keep his distance, to avoid proximity to their aura. Their encounter takes place in the course of a single weekend, and it’s composed mainly of a pair of scenes in an airplane (coming and going), a pair at the airport, one at the rehearsal dinner, one on a festive countryside outing, and one in bed. Lindsay is a voluble, confrontational social activist who, despite her shattering experience years earlier with Frank’s brother (he left her five weeks before their planned wedding), remains a romantic at heart. ![]() Frank is a gruff, dour corporate executive who works out obsessively and faces life cynically. What’s remarkable and daring about “Destination Wedding” is that it takes place in a mere handful of long dialogue scenes, some that seem to run ten minutes or more. Levin displays his concept and his vision as writer and director, but I’m reminded of André Bazin’s line regarding the notion of directors as auteurs: “Authors, yes-but of what?” They do all the work to bring a head-scratching script and neutered images to life, and they do it with energy and enthusiasm, yet I found myself watching the film with embarrassment for them, for the actions that they were directed to perform in service of a grotesquely misconceived movie. Yet the movie is, for the most part, excruciating-a bewildering, deadening experience that, for all its emphasis on its great actors, leaves them to display their talents and exert their craft in a cinematic and psychological void. They start bickering mere moments into their chance encounter. Frank (Reeves) and Lindsay (Ryder) meet at an airport en route to the wedding of Frank’s brother, who is also Lindsay’s ex-and for whom they share an enduring hatred, which seems to be just about all they share. That’s the premise of “Destination Wedding,” written and directed by Victor Levin, which will be released in theatres on Friday and digitally a week later, which is promising in principle: it features a pair of the most idiosyncratic stars of our time, Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves, who are front and center throughout. It’s one of the classic movie tropes: two travellers divided by temperament and experience-the socialite and the scientist, the heiress and the reporter, the criminal and the prosecutor-are thrown together by circumstances, squabbling along the way and falling in love.
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