Inlaws & Outlaws

This winsomely poignant documentary from filmmaker Drew Emery attempts to capture the essence of marriage through several experiences told by a group of people whose stories of courtship, romance and even heartbreak collectively paint a broad but effective portrait of modern love. Tackling a potentially controversial issue (the ongoing debate over gay marriage) through simple storytelling instead of polemics, it effectively makes its case while barely trying. The film succeeds primarily due to the inclusion of not only long-term couples, but also those whose relationships didn’t work out, as well as a healthy cross-section of both gay and straight couples and singles who hope to one day settle down. Emery wisely sidesteps any controversy by eschewing political rhetoric and instead delivers his message (love is love, regardless of sexual orientation) through stories that demonstrate the universality of wanting to spend the rest of your life with someone. Indeed, only the cold-hearted could find fault with one elderly woman’s professions of devotion to her wife (“It’s a wonderful feeling to love somebody so much… I can’t imagine life without her”), or in one man’s tale of finding joy in life following the death of his life partner. The often humorous stories are woven throughout the film and connected by footage of Seattle jazz and soul singer Felicia Loud crooning popular standards in a jazz club (the one aspect of the film that feels contrived), touching upon the excitement of infatuation, the pain of lost love and the fulfillment of long-term commitment. It’s the kind of movie that should be shown in schools, churches and to parents to convey the importance of marriage equality. It’s also one for the gay time capsule, providing a lasting impression of love in an often marginalized community. —Ken Knox

Jindabyne

Raymond Carver's story So Much Water, So Close to Home presents a moral dilemma: Four fisherman stumble across a body, continue fishing and report the dead girl a few days later. The ripples of their inaction are the heart of Carver's exploration; it was also one of the narratives in Robert Altman's Short Cuts.

Ray Lawrence's elegiac Jindabyne places Carver's dilemma in the isolated high country of New South Wales. For its first hour, the film is sure-footed, incisive. Lawrence's mountain community, filled with immigrants and wanderers, feels authentic. Claire and Stewart (Laura Linney and Gabriel Byrne) are raising their son while still healing from Claire's abandonment of the family after his birth. Jude and Carl, their own daughter's death a fresh wound, are mishandling a precocious and troubled granddaughter. Rocco, the town bachelor, is dating a feisty Aboriginal schoolteacher. Billy and Elissa—the youngest couple—are new parents looking for more permanence than the itinerant life they're leading. Lawrence's cast delivers lived-in, non-fussy performances. He captures off-the-cuff small-town conversations with their underlying conflicts and histories. Everything leading to the discovery of the body—the girl is Aboriginal—is skillful, ambiguous and tantalizing.

Yet once the men return from fishing, the movie implodes. Enticing undercurrents of gender, race and class conflict grow obvious. Did the men ignore the body because it was a woman? Were they acting from deep-seated prejudice against the Maori? The subtlety of the acting evaporates. Lawrence turns Linney—a fearless actress—into a righteous nag. Claire's plight to restore balance to her community seems less like moral fortitude than a return of her mental instability (which, though never explained, must have been one horrific post-partum depression). The promise of Lawrence's film goes up in smoke along with the hallowed spirits of the dead. —Dan Loughry

Paris, Je T’aime

What's not to love about Paris, Je T'aime, an omnibus of 18 films by 20 directors each set in a different arrondissement [Parisian districts]? Well, plenty, in fact. Despite the inclusion of films by popular international filmmakers, most of these love-themed shorts are simply unmemorable, many of them just bad dates.

There are several pretentious vignettes, such as “Quartier de la Madeleine” in which Elijah Wood fights off a vampire (Olga Kurylenko), or “Place des Victoires” with Juliette Binoche as a grieving mother that strain viewers' patience even with running times under 10 minutes. Even Christopher Doyle's stylish “Porte de Choisy” features an overdone Hong Kong action sequence set in a trendy hair salon that is too over the top to be enjoyable. The Coen Brothers play up American stereotypes in their strained entry, “Tuileries,” which stars Steve Buscemi as a tourist caught looking at a passionate couple in the metro.

The most successful episodes are the ones that make their points subtly, such as Walter Salles' poignant “Loin du 16e” featuring Catalina Sandino Morena as a nanny commuting to work across town. The token queer entry, Gus Van Sant's sweet if obvious romance, “Le Marais,” features Elias McConnell (from Elephant ) being wooed by Gaspard Ulliel (Hannibal Rising), who enters his print shop with Marianne Faithfull.

Paris Je T'aime hits its stride when its films address the dynamics of relationships with respect to the particular district, such as Wes Craven's episode featuring newlyweds Emily Mortimer and Rufus Sewell dissecting their marriage in a cemetery. But this can be downright painful, as the obnoxious mimes prove in “Tour Eiffel.”

And while there is great pleasure to see Ben Gazzara and Gena Rowlands duke it out in a bar for director Gerard Depardieu, the pièce de résistance is Alexander Payne's entry, “14e arrondissement” featuring character actor Margo Martindale as a Denver post office clerk/French student who describes her trip to Paris. If every short in this uneven anthology were as deeply moving as this one, Paris Je T'aime would be magnifique. Unfortunately, this disappointing travelogue will have viewers asking, “where's the love?”—Gary M. Kramer

Snow Cake

Snow Cake—the phrase is both soft and harsh—is an oddly precise title for Marc Evans' delicate film about the intersection of dissimilar lives in Ontario. The film balances tragedy and comedy without once tipping the scales toward overstatement or sentimentality.

The melancholy Alex Hughes (Alan Rickman) is approached at a roadside diner by the vivacious Vivienne. His air of quiet desperation is a mismatch to her outsized eccentricities, yet he ends up offering to drive her to mother's in Wawa. The strangers form a tenuous bond—the inward Hughes responding to the girl's unbounded joie de vivre. After stopping to purchase a few small gifts for her mother, they are sideswiped by a truck. Vivienne is killed instantly. Guilt-laden, Hughes seeks out the dead girl’s mother, Linda (Sigourney Weaver), a high-functioning autistic. They find comfort in each other through a period of grief that neither wholly understands.

Evans doesn't traffic in melodrama. The characters—deftly limned in Angela Pell's script—are humorous, contradictory and gloriously human. Emily Hampshire is vibrant as Vivienne. Her death is bracing; we feel it. Rickman wrings perfect variations on his sad-sack persona. He's wickedly funny when self-deprecating, yet he never loses sight of the man's tragic past.

Weaver astonishes here. Her Linda is graceful—like many autistic adults—and cursed with the compulsions of movie autism. She hardly registers the loss of her child at first—she's delighted instead by the sparkly toys that Vivienne bought her before the accident and that Hughes delivers to her doorstep—but the finality of death flares up in overpowering waves which she struggles to understand. The range of quicksilver, disparate emotions Weaver brings to her portrayal is dizzying. Linda may not fully know the extent of her loss, but Weaver, with help from Evans, allows the audience to feel it—unequivocally— for her. —D.L.