Film of the week: Enough Said - review

A middle-aged romance takes hold in an endearing comedy which brings one of James Gandolfini’s last roles
19 October 2013

We watch films starring dead actors all the time without a second thought. It’s just not possible to do that, though, with this lovely, funny romcom, about people looking for love again in their fifties, after divorce, as their children leave home.

This isn’t James Gandolfini’s last film (there’s a crime thriller called Animal Rescue with Noomi Rapace and Tom Hardy still to come) but it was shot not long before he died suddenly of a heart attack, aged just 51, in June — and it’s impossible not to think of that, because, charismatic though he may be, he looks in this film, even without that hindsight, not just upsettingly overweight, the complete Pavarotti indeed, but altogether much older than he should at that age. Moreover, problematic obesity and bad habits are worked deep into his part in the movie.

Eva (comedian Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Elaine Benes in Seinfeld, very funny here, her sharp comic timing not quite getting in the way of psychological realism) is a divorced single mother, living a comfortable life in Los Angeles’s Westside, working as a very proper masseuse. Her only daughter is about to go to college and she is dreading an empty nest.

At a party, she meets fat Albert (Gandolfini), also divorced with a teenage daughter. “There’s not one man at this party I’m attracted to,” she’s just been saying. “There’s no one here I’m attracted to either,” he says. “It’s kind of an ugly crowd,” she agrees. They’re good together straightaway and, making each other laugh, they begin to date.

It’s different at this age. Dreyfus and Gandolfini were both born in 1961, while the writer and director of this film, Nicole Holofcener, who is, in a wholly sympathetic way, obviously working pretty closely out of her own life-experience here, was born in 1960. This isn’t one of those deceitful Hollywood romcoms where a vast age gap between the man and the woman isn’t even mentioned — it’s much more honest and accurate than that.

One of the things that’s different is having a track record, having failed in coupledom already. On their first date, as they begin tentatively to find out about each other, Albert mentions his ex and Eva smartly asks: “Can I have her number please?” “Can you imagine the time that would save?” they agree. “We should have a sign round our necks saying what’s wrong with us.” In a way, they already do.

For, at that same party, Eva also meets Marianne (Catherine Keener), a stylish woman with an impressive home — “Can I live here?” Eva blurts out when she walks in — who becomes first a client and then a friend. Marianne is given to bitching about her ex’s bad habits, obesity and sexual ineptitude.

Only when it is too late for her to find the courage to own up does Eva realise that it’s Albert that Marianne was married to and whom she is trashing like “a human TripAdvisor”. “Albert is not a hotel,” a therapist friend points out. “But if you can avoid staying in a bad one, you would,” Eva argues and carries on listening to the man she has fallen for being abused. Then she turns on him herself, saying at a dinner party she’s going to get him a calorie book as a present.

Gandolfini is so good in this film, in such a different way from Tony Soprano, that (quite separately from the emotional concerns of the film itself) it’s truly upsetting to think we’ll have no more of him in such roles. He’s both very funny, repeatedly fooling Eva, and then very touching too. He asks Eva, was just protecting herself, when she says simply: “What about us? What about protecting us?” Nonetheless, Holofcener doesn’t pretend that his huge belly and pouchy face don’t exist. The glancing sex scenes aren’t pretty. “You didn’t open your eyes at any point, did you?” he asks after their first time. Later, squashed, she actually bleats “Ow!”

It’s obviously reprehensible to take women’s films to be a genre in themselves but here goes anyway: Enough Said, which is a little bit more commercially pitched than Holofcener’s previous movies, is brilliantly feminine, at once very acute about women’s ways and generous about men and their comparative obtuseness and simplicity. Put it another way: this movie itself is nothing less than captivating, perfectly poised between jokes and tenderness. Go see.

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