PLAYING MONA LISA A film review by Steve Rhodes Copyright 2000 Steve Rhodes RATING (0 TO ****): * 1/2
In Matthew Huffman's PLAYING MONA LISA, Alicia Witt, as 23-year-old pianist Claire Goldstein, is fairly charming in a movie that almost never is. As sweet as her favorite Ho-Ho's, Claire is an attractive redhead who woofs down junk food like carrot sticks but stays as skinny as a fashion model. A flat and fairly lifeless comedy, PLAYING MONA LISA generates only a couple of chuckles and not even many smiles.
Soon after the movie starts, Claire is shown playing her heart out in the famous Tchaikovsky Competition. After that, the screenplay by Marni Freedman and Carlos De Los Rios drops the whole young artist angle like a hot potato. It does reappear briefly a few times in the narrative. Although we are supposed to assume that Claire is still a competitive musician, she never bothers to practice, and music plays almost no part of her everyday life. This is one of many unbelievable aspects of the script. Another is the way that Claire discusses intimate details of her sex life with Bennett (Harvey Fierstein), her gay music professor.
Claire's parents are played by Marlo Thomas and Elliott Gould, the latter being a member of my red-flag list of actors who make me question the quality of any movie that hires them. Her mother is the typical overbearing Jewish mother so popular in the cinema, although the story takes pains to alternatively minimize and maximize the family's Jewish heritage. Her father is mentally out to lunch. For those of you who aren't fans of Gould be warned that you have to endure a smarmy scene with Gould and Thomas dancing on a rooftop, as well as an even worse one of them staring at a tablecloth in one of the most unbelievable drug hallucination scenes on record.
The movie, which is devoid of almost any comedic energy, likes to toss out throwaway lines and ideas. Claire ridicules her best friend Sabrina (Brooke Langton, head cheerleader in THE REPLACEMENTS) for having an affair with a bigamist (Ivan Sergei), but nothing more is said about his wives. At other times the movie wants to be taken as an old-fashioned screwball comedy, complete with quirky characters in every room.
James Glennon's drab cinematography with its washed-out colors manages to make San Francisco look downright dreary. Even the film's sound is singularly dull, as if the theater had just installed heavy curtains on the walls. Overall, the picture reminds one of those movies that you see at film festivals in which you just shake your head and think to yourself that they'll never get a distributor.
Is there anything at all unusual about PLAYING MONA LISA? Yes, reading. Several characters are shown reading for the pure pleasure of enjoying a good novel. In an electronics-infatuated age reading books is a wonderfully retro idea.
PLAYING MONA LISA runs 1:38. It is rated R for drug content, sex-related dialogue and brief language and would be acceptable for older teenagers.
Email: Steve.Rhodes@InternetReviews.com Web: http://www.InternetReviews.com
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