Reaser and Mol
Puccini for Beginners
Written and directed by Maria Maggenti
“There are two kinds of people in the world—those who feel with their hearts and those who feel with their heads. I was the head-feeling kind. That’s how I got into this mess.”
So explains Allegra (Elizabeth Reaser), the novelist protagonist at the start of Maria Maggenti’s Puccini for Beginners. Allegra is explaining how she came to be dating both halves of a couple on the rocks—the Columbia philosophy professor Philip (Justin Kirk) and the investment banker Grace (Gretchen Mol).
But despite its appealing female principals (Kirk, on the other hand, is a bit smarmy) and cozy Manhattan nooks, this dramedy about various forms of sexual and romantic ambivalence falls flat. For all its semi-intellectual chatter, while we get to know Allegra’s bed, we never get a good sense of her heart or her head. She claims, by the end of the tale, to have grown—and we believe her in as much as we believe in her at all—but we don’t know enough about the context and nature of that change to celebrate with her.
While the pacing sometimes falters, the fundamental problem is the script. It’s so focused on defining the characters’ sexuality that it forgets to define much else about them, and it mistakes camera time for narrative quality time. Allegra can apply some sketchy feminist theory to Turandot, but for a novelist, much less one nominated for a major book award, she spends little time reading or writing, and a lot of time seeing old movies, shallowly yammering on about the nature of commitment, and binge eating and drinking. And what of Philip, who also seems way too busy sampling restaurants to have garnered that tasty offer from the University of Chicago? Grace, far from her banking offices, is seen working only at her avocation of glass blowing, which seems primarily an excuse for a funky scene set and some pointed entendre regarding foundry jargon.
Allegra's and Philip’s narcissism is perhaps more realistic, but no more winning. That they know they’re cliches and can recognize their own unhealthy behavior patterns doesn’t make them less cliched or predictable. In Mol, we take Grace’s uncertain plummet into her first lesbian liaison a little more to heart, but the sketchiness of the character limits even that emotional investment. Kissing Jessica Stein handled the same material with considerably more aplomb, tenderness, wit, and sexual nuance.
Then there’s the wry, imagined commentary on these goings on by incidental characters—a cafe waitress, a subway-train operator, and so on—which was cutting edge 30 years ago. When Harry Met Sally just barely got away with plundering the Annie Hall device in the late ’80s, and Sex and the City wisely abandoned it after an early season. Maggenti should have known better. Additional exegesis by peripheral characters—for instance, two sushi chefs at an eatery Allegra frequents—is also contrived and unconvincing. But their dismissive references to Allegra and her neurotic menagerie of cerebral sex adventurers does strike a chord. For Allegra's passions, on their route from head to heart, somehow ricochet clear of both regions in the viewer.
-A.C.K.
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