Hateship Loveship movie review (2014)
After working in the employ of an elderly woman for most of her life, Johanna (Wiig) gets a job as a housekeeper in Iowa for Mr. McCauley (Nick Nolte) and his feisty teenage granddaughter Sabitha (Hailee Steinfeld). Sabitha's mother was killed when her father Ken (Guy Pearce) crashed their car, drunk at the wheel. He has done time in prison, which is why Sabitha lives with her grandfather. Ken is visiting when Johanna shows up on the doorstep for her first day. He is friendly to her, inviting her out for burgers with his daughter, saying to her off-handedly when she does something helpful, "Thanks, gorgeous." At his comment, something enormous arises from the depths in Wiig's face. We don't know anything about Johanna, not really, and yet the strange blush that creeps up over her face, the sudden smile struggling at her lips, makes us understand everything.
Guy Pearce plays Ken as a guy who, despite all of his problems, still has glimmers of the charm and warmth that he probably had as a young guy. His kindness to Johanna is not targeted or creepy, but automatic and casual. He is filled with self-loathing over his mistakes: his drug addiction, being a terrible dad unable to take care of his daughter, and knowing that everyone thinks he is a loser. But watch how he approaches McCauley about a loan for the motel he wants to fix up in Chicago. He "sells" it in a way that is almost convincing, what a good investment it will be, how great it all will be when it is done, how it will be the very thing he needs to get his life in order. And Pearce plays him without judgment: Ken is a guy who buys his own lines, at least while he is saying them. It's a complex character, in other words, and "Hateship Loveship" lets him be complex. It doesn't ask us to come down on one side or the other. His actions are often reprehensible. And sometimes he is beautifully warm and accepting. Both are true.
Sabitha and her friend Edith (Sami Gayle) concoct a cruel joke to play on the new housekeeper, who floats drably around the house, cooking and cleaning and wearing weird clothes. They send her a letter, purportedly from Sabitha's dad, basically saying he can't stop thinking about her ever since they first met, and would she be his friend? Johanna, alone in bed, reads the letter, again with these uncontrollable feelings swarming up from the depths and doing battle on her face. There is an absolutely extraordinary scene, breathtaking in its vulnerability, where Johanna presses her lips up against the bathroom mirror and kisses herself passionately, slobberingly, like she maybe saw in a movie once. The moment could be pathetic. It isn't. It has in it all of the need and yearning of lonely people everywhere.
