The Longest Week movie review (2014)
Jason Bateman stars as Conrad Valmont, a ridiculously wealthy child of privilege who has thus far frittered away his life on wine, women and a career as a would-be novelist who has yet to actually complete a work, let alone publish or sell it. As the story opens, his divorcing parents have had enough and not only cut him off financially but kick him out of the hotel that they own and where he has lived since childhood. Once the news finally sinks in, the now-penniless Conrad moves in with frenemy Dylan (Billy Crudup), a struggling artist who nevertheless has actually completed the odd painting or two, and after meeting his new girlfriend, model Beatrice (Olivia Wilde), impulsively decides to steal her away from his friend despite his lack of funds or even a place to live.
After watching "The Longest Week" for only a few minutes, most viewers will easily begin to discern the central artistic influences of debuting writer-director Peter Glanz—it includes, among other things, the arch visual style and droll narration of Wes Anderson (primarily "The Royal Tenenbaums"), the New York locations and highfaluting literary/psychoanalytical references of Woody Allen (not to mention Tony Roberts in a supporting role) and characters who seem to live in an insular world of their own a la Whit Stillman. (He also throws in a brief homage to the Madison sequence from Godard's immortal "Band of Outsiders" for good measure.) One could hardly pick three better filmmakers to follow in the footsteps of than this particular trio but it also becomes obvious within a few minutes that while Glanz is able to offer up a vague simulacrum of their most overt artistic traits, he has no discernible sense of what it is that makes them tick and what makes their work so distinctive.
Glanz so closely appropriates the look and feel of Anderson's films throughout that it could easily be mistaken for an especially dry spoof of his idiosyncratic formalism until the realization is made that he is trying to be totally serious in this regard. Likewise, the dialogue is archly conceived as can be but there is hardly a single line here that sounds like anything that an actual human being might say in real life. In fact, the only line that rings even remotely true comes when the narrator (Larry Pine) at one point intones "His pseudo-intellectual banter was wearing thin." This may sound dumb out of context but when compared to the likes of "You want to smell sexually ambiguous?" and "She was a hopeless romantic and he was hopelessly romantic," you will want to stitch it into a sampler as quickly as possible. As for the characters spouting these lines, they are so resolutely unappealing—even the ones we are supposed to like—that it is impossible to work up any sort of rooting interest in them or their problems.
