More downs than ups are found in Heights.
"Actresses will happen in the best regulated families," a wise man once noted, which I've always imagined to be rather like large Irish broods consigning one of their progeny to the priesthood. ***image2***
Heights
offers up Glenn Close as the sacrificial lamb for her New York tribe, an aging stage beauty stuck with the role of being brilliant, witty, famous and happy despite the fact that her life's coming unglued. From the film's first scene, Close seethes with vitality and energy as Diana, an acclaimed actress teaching master class at Julliard. "We are not fiery people," she spits at her students, and an infinitesimal flash of regret flits across her face. "We can't remember what it's like to be consumed by passion. If I find out my husband is sleeping with someone else, I cry into my soy latte…For chrissake, take a risk!"
***image1***Though the risks taken by the characters of
Heights
are inevitably small, quiet ones, over the course of 24 hours each of them must come to terms with some more or less unpleasant truths. Diana's daughter Isabel (Elizabeth Banks, unconvincingly mousy and pouty) begins having cold feet about her impending wedding to Jonathan (James Marsden), right about the time that Peter (John Light) begins researching a Vanity Fair piece about his famous-photographer lover and Diana auditions a desperate young actor (Jesse Bradford) for her next play.
Heights
works to the extent that it snares us into being intrigued with how all these New Yorkers will eventually intersect with one another.
Heights
also gains in stature with its inclusion of cameos from Isabella Rossellini, George Segal as a wry, gentle rabbi, and bittersweet folkie Rufus Wainwright in his scene-stealing debut as a catty jilted lover. But the film's disappointingly dull young leads fall prey to exactly what Close was waxing hortatory about to her drama class: They are souls without longing, just running their lines, comfortably numb in an existence well-wadded with iPods and therapy. "Look at her-she's younger than me and she's already given up on everything," Isabel says sententiously of a homeless woman, and you find yourself wishing Isabel would get evicted and have some serious difficulties on her hands, not just white-girl problems like organizing a large wedding. Yet by the third act of the film, the viewer's utterly engrossed, sucked into the characters' world, even if it is a rather constricted one. Or as one character, having been asked if his relationship is real, replies resignedly: It's close enough.
