"Enough Said"
Directed by Nicole Holofcener
Starring Julia Louis Dreyfus, James Gandolfini, Catherine Keener, Toni Collette, Ben Falcone, Tracey Fairaway, Michaela Watkins
Comedy
93 Mins
PG-13
The passing of James Gandolfini delivered a wrecking-ball wallop to the artistic community. Those who knew him described him as being closer in nature to a teddy bear than the character he was most known for portraying - the volatile Tony Soprano. In light of this fact, his role as Albert in Enough Said is probably the most soul-bearing role he has ever portrayed. Revealing a portly puppy dog who  wants acceptance and love more than anything, this may very well be the closest we've ever come to truly understanding the emotional complexity residing behind Gandolfini's soulful eyes. While it would be a touch disingenuous to call his work here a "knockout," his performance is thoughtfully restrained and bitingly honest in every way imaginable.

To watch this film and not be transported into thoughts of what Gandolfini might have done next is difficult to skirt around but it's a task that we, the audience, are charged with while watching. But as both a reminder of his talent and a way of saying goodbye to the man, Enough Said has more than enough to say, especially in terms of the massive talent of its two stars. 




Julia Louis Dreyfus, hot off a big win at the Emmys for her role on the hit HBO series, Veep, plays Eva, a single mother who gets tangled up in a new, complicated relationship with Gandolfini's Albert. Having just met a new client and friend in Catherine Keener's poet Marianne at the same gathering where she met Albert, Eva soon comes to realize that the new man in her life is the ex-husband of the new friend in her life. Obviously, moral complications arise from her not letting either party in on her big secret as she continues to pursue both relationships with reckless abandon.

Rationalizing her role in both Albert and Marianne's lives, Eva convinces herself that by utilizing Marianne's weathered knowledge of Albert as a husband and lover both, she can potentially save herself some time by getting all the dirty details up front rather than having to wait around for them to bear their ugly heads. But even while using Marianne as an unknowing rat, Eva can't really grasp the barrage of complaints as she sees Albert as a kind and funny man, regardless of his rotund stature.

At one point, Eva asks close friend Sarah, played Toni Collette, employing her homegrown Australian accent, whether her ex-husband is unlovable or if he's just not the right person for her. Are there some people who just aren't worthy of loving or is love just a series of calculations and miscalculations, a series of experiments towards a more perfect chemistry. It's clear that Eva has answered her own question in the process of asking it but still continues to extract information like a CIA mole. Subtle moments like these dig deeper into the emotional subtext than can be expected from the bumbling faux-drama of the romantic comedy framework. While Enough Said is undeniably a rom-com, it's the rare one that works.



Clearly demonstrative of the mature nature of director and screenwriter Nicole Holofcener, these heavy-hitting examinations of what makes a relationship "good" are grounded in a reality where we all live, one that posits that the familiar adage, "It's not you, it's me" is more than reasonable excuse for a relationship's conclusion. Like a six-piece puzzle for children, it's clear that some pieces just aren't meant to fit, no matter how hard you try to jam them together.

Try though you may to make a relationship work, once you've finally washed your hands of it, it's easy to see the proverbial tears in the fabric and ensuing incompatibilities set in motion from day one. As the old adage of psychology goes, hindsight is 20/20 and there's no need to beat yourself up for it too much. Some things just aren't meant to be but getting to that realization is a learning process in itself. We all make mistakes, Holofcener's film says, but can we learn from them?

Thankfully, she's been around the block enough times to actually understand the underlying message of her film enough to titillate the audience. In many regards, Dreyfus is a vehicle for Holofcener's battling conscious - the good angel and bad angel arguing over which road is best. We feel her presence in Dreyfus and it makes for a sense of honesty uncommon for the genre. In parsing genuine feeling from stereotypical emotional arcs, Holofcener, Dreyfus, and Gandolfini have gotten to the truth of the matter rather than re-constituting freeze-dried bags of romcom tropes.

When Eva's promising new relationship starts wearing quicker than it would under normal circumstances - her mind filled with stories of Albert's slobbish gluttony and general immaturity - the glimmer of hope for mid-life companionship begins to flicker. We watch, silently judging Eva's sly game and yet to chide her actions unconditionally is to say that hers is a position we could never see ourselves in. I don't know about you, but the opportunity to unearth someone's dirty laundry before we get in bed with them (so to speak) is one that's hard to pass up for any reasonably damaged human being.

By putting these reasonably challenging questions on display, Enough Said feels like it has a sense of purpose. It's abundantly evident that no one here is in it for the paycheck (particularly Dreyfus, who is worth a staggering three billion, with a b, dollars) and that this passion project is propelled by bona-fide passion. It does have moments where it drags its feet and some clunky adherence to genre clichés - a gag-worthy moment in the airport is particularly slack-lined - but those are largely overcome by the inspired chemistry between Dreyfus and Gandolfini - a woman set to continue on her string of victories and a man who will be dearly missed.

B-

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