Peace, Love & Misunderstanding

There are precious few good
roles for women of a certain age, but it’s still distressing to see the
immortal Jane Fonda reduced to playing a bliss-addicted hippy granny in
absurdly corny, crowd pleasing pap. At least Jane still looks fabulous,
traipsing around in flowing scarves, peasant dresses and a half-ton of curly,
gray-streaked extensions in her hair as Grace, the freest of spirits still
living the ’60s dream in Woodstock, N.Y., but now tasked with providing love
and wisdom to the newer generations. Her uptight yuppie-lawyer daughter Diane
(Katherine Keener) is facing divorce, and oddly heads for the comfort of the
mom she’s been estranged from for decades. Along for the ride are her bright,
surly teens, Jacob (Nat Wolf) who obsessively videotapes everything, and Zoe
(Elizabeth Olsen) who obsessively pouts about everyone and everything in her
line of sight.

Safely tucked away under one
drafty, farmhouse roof, the three women and one boy, set about hashing out (pun
intended) their differences over tea, drum circles and a few huge bong loads.
The healing process is accelerated because everyone of these cynical city folks
find love in the less complicated, touristy backwoods, and the subplots eat up
screen time that otherwise would’ve been spent on more mother-daughter bitch
sessions than needed.

The script, by rookies Joseph
Muszynski and Christina Mengert is steeped in obviousness; politically aware
vegan Zoe falls for a shy, hunky butcher. Keener meanwhile saddles up to a
motorcycle-riding folkie, played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who tries to smirk his
way through the role, and then performs an utterly appalling rendition of “The
Weight,” which the late Levon Helm was mercifully spared from hearing.

Morgan’s awful caterwauling
is just one of the cringe worthy elements in this cheesy romp, which takes
quality actors and burdens them with hokey dialogue and hackneyed situations.

Director Bruce Beresford’s
career has wobbled between excellence (Tender Mercies) and schlock (Her
Alibi) and he was due for a follow-up stinker to the very fine Mao’s
Last Dancer.

Beresford’s content to sit
back and watch his cast wade though a river of sentimentalism and cliché boomer
nostalgia that’s a mile wide and an inch deep. Maybe in another 20 years or so
Gen X-ers will start making movies about the underappreciated majesty of Urge
Overkill, and how “you just had to be there” for Lollapalooza, but I sure as
hell hope not.

Showing at the Landmark Main Art Theatre, 118 N. Main St., Royal Oak; 248-263-2111.

This article appears in Jun 6-12, 2012.