REVIEW:
Here’s a movie where very little happens, and yet somehow it is being commended left and right (it is even nominated for best picture of the year,) for what it doesn’t do. We have the story of a woman who once had a relationship with a man. And now, decades later, she’s married to someone else, when that man comes to visit. Which means the woman and the man have conversations about what might have been.
It’s kind of like the concept from Sliding Doors, that Gwenyth Paltrow movie from the nineties, only instead of showing us the interesting things happen, it’s just characters talking about how it could have happened. And it’s not just the woman and the man talking, but also the woman and her husband.
So what then is the appeal? Why are people liking this movie so much? They are liking it because it’s realistic. Because the husband isn’t a jerk or a villain, and the man from her past who comes to see her is also not a jerk or a villain. And the movie even calls that out, bringing it right to our attention, with the husband saying something like, “if this were a story, I’d be the evil white guy standing in the way of long lost true love.” But since when is a movie good simply because of what it doesn’t do? Yes, it’s realistic, but it’s also uneventful.