REVIEW

The Face of Love

Tom (Ed Harris) has no idea he’s an exact duplicate of Nikki’s (Annette Bening) dead husband in The Face of Love.
Tom (Ed Harris) has no idea he’s an exact duplicate of Nikki’s (Annette Bening) dead husband in The Face of Love.

The clone wars have begun: On the heels of Muppets Most Wanted and Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy, Arie Posin’s The Face of Love presents as the latest in an odd run of movies featuring doppelgangers. (Also on the horizon is The Double, a Jesse Eisenberg vehicle based on the same Dostoevski short story that inspired Jose Saramago’s novel The Double, which Villeneuve adapted into Enemy.)

The Face of Love is the least engaging of these movies so far, although it’s watchable enough if you’re not in a demanding mood.There’s lots of clean-lined Los Angeles architecture and art on display. Annette Bening and Ed Harris remain fascinating even when the characters they’re given to play aren’t. And then there’s the strange spectacle of Robin Williams restraining himself in a small sit-commy role as a mildly annoying next-door neighbor. Just who is this Arie Posin and why does he seem to have such clout?

I’m guessing Posin - best known for 2005’s The Chumscrubber - didn’t wow his talent with the script he wrote with Matthew McDuffie. Maybe it just fit everyone’s schedules; after all, it was shot in Los Angeles, and no one had to gain or lose a tremendous amount of weight. The pitch could have sounded interesting - five years after her beloved husband’s tragic death, a woman meets a man who is his exact double. She begins a relationship with him without telling him about the uncanny resemblance.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to imagine how Posin could have taken a more pedestrian approach to this situation. Much in the film is telegraphed, from the opening moments when Nikki (Bening) and Garrett (Harris) are introduced as a blissfully happy married couple, celebrating their 30th anniversary in a Mexican resort. Garrett is playful and sexy - he’s even smuggled a little bit of marijuana into the country for their private enjoyment. Later we’ll discover he’s an architect who built his bride a dream home that looks like something out of a David Hockney painting. So of course when the bellhop warns him about dangerous rip tides we know he’s doomed.

In the first of many, many melodramatic moments that might have given Douglas Sirk pause, it’s Nikki who finds his body washed up onto the beach the next morning.

Dissolve to five years later, and she’s pushing on, despite the huge hole the loss of Garrett has left in her life. She has reinvented herself as a real estate “stager” - she makes empty for-sale houses look lived-in - and she allows her widower neighbor Roger (Williams) to swim in her pool. (Literally. That’s not a euphemism. Though Roger can wish.)

But after her daughter (Jess Weixler) asks her why she doesn’t go to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where she and Garrett used to hang out, she snaps, “I don’t like to look back.” Still she goes, though she doesn’t know why. (The man in the ticket booth asks, “In pursuit of the past?” - the name of the current exhibition - but she only wants to visit the regular collection.)

It’s there that she spots Tom Young (also Harris) and things go completely off the rails.

At first, the sight of her husband’s double seems to give her comfort. But then, inexplicably, she needs to know more about him. She stalks him, shows up at the art class he teaches at Occidental College, engages him for some private art lessons and eventually begins an affair with him that inevitably leads back to that same Mexican beach.

Through it all, we watch Bening trying very hard to produce a parsable, credible performance while having to behave in bizarre ways. Unlike Jake Gyllenhaal in Enemy, there’s no real undercurrent of psychological dread or surreal menace in the movie - nothing to account for her apparent madness other than her own loopiness. Garrett was a great guy, and Tom is a pretty cool guy as well. We don’t for an instant entertain the idea that he might be more (or less) than he appears to be. Though we understand that in this sort of movie, he’s going to have a secret.

The Face of Love is unlikely to elicit the strong negative reactions that Enemy has. It is almost a meditation on carrying on after tragedy, of reinventing oneself after life-shattering loss. But it so completely fails to understand how real people might honestly react in the face of the inexplicably strange that our thoughts slide right over the characters to the actors who are playing them.

I didn’t spend a lot of time pondering Nikki’s motives in the film, but I did catch myself wondering what the hell Annette Bening was thinking.

The Face of Love 79 Cast: Annette Bening, Ed Harris, Robin Williams, Jess Weixler, Amy Brenneman Director: Arie Posin Rating: PG-13, for brief drug references Running time: 88 minutes

MovieStyle, Pages 33 on 04/04/2014

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