Review: Family Law

Family Law opens with 30-something Ariel Perelman (Daniel Hendler) relating his father's maxim for happiness: "A man is free when he can read his paper and eat his breakfast without having to talk to anyone." The father is named Bernardo Perelman (Arturo Goetz), but is referred to throughout the film only as "Perelman," as if the name is a title that the son will have to earn in order to claim it as his own. The Perelmans are professional Argentinian Jews, balancing various careers and commitments and lifestyle choices, some more successfully than others. Ariel is prone to talking himself out of happiness and perplexed at some of the absurdities of modern city living. When he scoffs at the request of his child's kindergarten teacher that he participate in a play, she offers to have someone help him with his "communication problem." A tense discussion with his wife is interrupted by a house painter, who offers some unwanted input. Unlike his father, Ariel hasn't yet found his 'secret of life', like that morning ritual of peaceful reading over breakfast.

Ariel's wife, Sandra (29-year old Julieta Diaz, a real find who should get more work) is a Pilates instructor who has learned to mostly ignore his nebbishness. In bed, with the lights out, his mumbling never stops: "Why do we have to give our son a Swiss education? Do you know what the Swiss did during World War II?" When he comes home one day to find her packing some bags, he blurts out his first thought: "You're leaving me?" During the day, Ariel is a legal ethics professor who doles out philosophical ruminations like "If someone is drowning and I kick a life belt away from him, is that murder? Tough one." Eventually, his fine-tuned world of grumbling and second-guessing will be rocked when his wife insists on taking off for an unplanned vacation -- without him -- and evidence begins to build of the father keeping an important secret from the son. The central performance by Hendler keeps the delicate engine of the film humming along throughout these transitions. He creates a character that is believably anchored to the story.

Alone with his son, Ariel makes some pathetic stabs at recapturing his youth by going to a video arcade and palling around with a friend who advises Playstation for keeping his son busy. He has no temptations of the 'adult' variety -- that would invite whole new levels of self-consciousness and nervousness -- and when a situation arises where he accidentally shares a bed with another woman, we see him the next morning ripping the sheets off the bed for washing. The point is that Ariel is working overtime to balance a life while his father does it effortlessly. The camera tracks Bernardo Perelman, a respected lawyer, as he walks about his daily routine, greeting people by first name and accessing entire case files in his head at a moment's notice. A few of these getting-to-know-you scenes drag on with more of a lightweight feel than is necessary -- this is not a documentary, after all. Still, it's a better feeling to be somewhat underwhelmed by a film's dramatic weight than to be bored by a lot of phoney-baloney crises and false contrivances.

At its most quiet moments, the mellow tone of the film evokes an undercurrent of sadness, as if family life has gotten too complex for people to communicate in a meaningful way without making a huge effort. A crucial, but sad decision made by one family member to withhold certain knowledge makes up the film's defining action. It's a decision made not out of malice, but just because life is too short to clutter up with bad memories. Why intrude on someone else's happiness? The characters are very selective about who they confide in, and one of the key relationships is revealed to be free of family ties: Perelman Sr. has a trusted secretary called Norita (Adriana Aizanberg) who looks her age and seems to have traveled a lot of miles with him over the years. The relationship between the two of them is handled with such care that it could be a bleak and cynical comment on how much of our lives we give over to work, although I suspect that writer/director Daniel Burman would define it in a more glass-half-full way than that.

Family Law is said to be similar to Burman's last picture, 2004's Lost Embrace, which was unseen by me and nominated for several prestigious awards. That film also starred Daniel Hendler and also concerned some of Argentina's hyphenated identities and how they see fit to cope with each other in the rush of daily life. Burman is clearly interested in the patchwork qualities of life -- how individuals stitch together what they have learned with the opportunities that present themselves. He's interested in people trying to spindle a life out of what they're given. His characters are constantly on the move, from one office to another, working from home, trying to negotiate their way into a better life. There's one quick romantic scene in Family Law between Ariel and Sandra, and even that requires some amount of negotiation to make sure the kid won't come bouncing into the room. An interesting move for Burman's next film might be to move his style out of the limited confines of family drama and into some new kind of juggling act, like a thriller.