When I was young(er), my Boston-based family would occasionally shlep out to Connecticut to visit my great-grandmother in her old age home. These excursions were annoying and generally unremarkable, but I do have one very specific memory of those trips: watching whatever soap opera happened to be playing on the big TV in the old folks’ communal dining center.
My parents are Ultra-Orthodox Jews who very rarely allowed my siblings and I to watch movies or TV of any sort, so whenever an opportunity would arise to take in a few minutes of precious #content, I would jump at the chance — no matter what it was. So every time we were at the old-age home, I’d excitedly watch a few minutes of some soap opera while my parents were in the next room visiting with my great-grandmother.
Those soap operas confounded me. It would take maybe three minutes before I was dead bored; I understood what was happening on screen but not why anyone would want to watch it. I’d survey the old people, they’d seem to be enjoying the program. I always assumed that the problem was on my end, that I was either a grade-A dunce or simply too young to appreciate the artistry that was “The Bold and the Beautiful” or “Days of Our Lives.” It took years for me to realize that those shows are not meant to be especially good, and that the fact that I, a #content-starved Orthodox Jewish child, instinctually didn’t enjoy them, was a mark of my own precocious and remarkable good taste.
I was ironically reminded of this feeling as I watched Mark Pellington’s “Nostalgia,” a movie that is either terrible or meant for people who are much older and much wiser than me. I kept wondering, as I forced myself to keep watching, if my reflexive intolerance of “Nostalgia” was a product of my age — if I am just too young and stupid to appreciate what is actually a smart, slow, adult drama.
When, after an interminable hour and fifty-three minutes and fifty-eight seconds, “Nostalgia” finally ended, I came to the conclusion that my highly discerning taste was serving me well yet again. “Nostalgia” isn’t a smart, adult drama. It’s insipid and bad, much more “The Young and the Restless” than “Terms of Endearment.”
“Nostalgia” is a sort of anthology movie, following the lives of several unrelated people played by Bruce Dern, Jon Hamm, Catherine Keener, John Ortiz, and Ellen Burstyn. The film’s first act establishes Ortiz’s insurance agent as the connective tissue between its disparate characters, with Ortiz first visiting the home of Dern’s character and then Burstyn’s. But Pellington dispenses with this gimmick fairly quickly: we last see Ortiz at the film’s thirty-minute mark. Instead, what connects the film’s characters is the titular nostalgia; everyone gets a prominent chance to stare off into the distance contemplating life, and death, and loss, and the universe and everything. Jon Hamm broods more in this disposable movie than he did in the entirety of “Mad Men.”
Speaking of Ortiz’s disappearance, one of the most obnoxious motifs in “Nostalgia” is to introduce characters as consequential to the plot, only to disappear them immediately and at weird intervals. Nick Offerman plays Burstyn’s son, he gets all of one scene. Amber Tamblyn might as well not be in this movie at all. Blink and you might literally miss the few seconds of screentime allocated to Patton Oswalt.
Burstyn’s character eventually has some of her belongings appraised by Hamm’s, after which she is expelled from the film in favor of Hamm and Keener, who plays his sister. It’s at this point that “Nostalgia” becomes less a mediative melodrama than a wallowing pit of sorrow and misery. The tearjerkery on display is something to behold. There’s a shot of Keener sitting in her shower, clothed, in the fetal position. This part of the movie is the most explicitly about grief; it’s sad, but bad. Bad sad.
There’s an especially bad-sad scene toward the very end of the movie, where Keener sits in a diner talking to someone who survived the same accident that killed her loved one. The survivor gives an astonishingly tin-eared, maybe even cruel monologue — yet Keener, and “Nostalgia” by association, seem to think it kind and thoughtful. It’s a scene right out of one of co-writer Alex Ross Perry’s terrifically acerbic comedies of manners, but incredibly out of place in the overly-earnest, bad-sad “Nostalgia.”
Ross Perry’s involvement in “Nostalgia” is totally fascinating to me, as its thesis statement about the decency of humankind seems anathema to his general ethos (see: “Listen Up, Philip” or “Queen of Earth”). I wonder if, in its original conception, “Nostalgia” was a more cynical piece of work, and if Ross Perry’s influence may eventually have been erased.
The primary characteristic of “Nostalgia” is that it’s deathly boring, and difficult to sit through in its entirety. A more established critic than I once told me to never to not finish a movie that I’d started, and I’ve generally held to that. But if I wasn’t reviewing “Nostalgia,” I’d’ve been out after 25 minutes. [D]