HopeDavis Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Here's a movie that deals with death and grief without hysterics, dramatic speeches or showy, Oscar-grubbing performances. Michael Winterbottom's Genova has a logline that sounds maudlin and turgid – after she inadvertently causes a car accident that kills her mother, a young girl starts seeing mom's ghost – but the movie turns out to be understated, down-to-earth, quietly sad. This is Winterbottom's most intimate film since 9 Songs, and one of the highlights of his career.

Genova has the wherewithal to show its characters dealing with loss in ways that aren't inherently cinematic. It would have been very striking, for example, to have the newly motherless children – the teenage Kelly (Willa Holland) and the preteen Mary (Perla Haney-Jardine) – scream, rage at the world, and slam doors in the face of their well-intentioned father Joe (Colin Firth) before concluding that Family Sticks Together. And in a film like this, I would have guessed that Joe would spiral into an alcoholic depression, or perhaps start a tumultuous, guilt-ridden affair with the old college friend (Catherine Keener) who comes back into his life.

Those are the arcs I would have expected to see. But though a couple doors do get slammed, Winterbottom's characters aren't here to amuse us or push our buttons. Their reactions to the tragedy and their ways of adjusting to a new life in the titular city all paint a much more nuanced picture – and the effect is more heartbreaking than any number of manipulative stunts could have achieved.

With five nominations, it looks like Superbad will be the star of the 2008 MTV Movie Awards, and its three jubilant male leads -- Michael Cera, Jonah Hill, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse -- deserve the kudos. But one major talent behind the whole affair has stayed relatively anonymous while these young up-and-comers bathe in the spotlight: Director Greg Mottola. The erstwhile independent filmmaker, responsible for some of the best installments of Arrested Developed and Undeclared, launched his career a solid decade before the rise of Judd Apatow with a charming little low budget comedy called The Daytrippers. Starring Stanley Tucci, Hope Davis, Liev Schreiber, Parker Posey and a host of other fantastic character actors, the film follows a wildly dysfunctional family over the course of a single day, as Davis, playing a worrisome housewife, tries to track down her unfaithful husband (Tucci).

Mixing warm humanity with pitch-perfect screwball timing, Daytrippers marked the sort of debut that told you a filmmaker had a big career ahead of him. After a modest premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival, it landed at Cannes, barely got a theatrical release and promptly vanished thereafter. Mottola turned to TV work, and slipped out of the film scene for a good ten years. These days, it's no easy task to track down Daytrippers on DVD -- you can nab second-hand copies on Amazon for decent rates, but not a single retail outlet carries it. Aside from the occasionally airings on cable, the movie has vanished.

Imagine how happy your life would be if you forgot the last 15 years. That would mean you no longer had any memory of a certain nude scene in About Schmidt. But it would also mean you no longer have any memory of the rest of About Schmidt. Anyway, the reason I mention that movie is because two of its stars, Hope Davis and Dermot Mulroney, will be reunited for a film about memory loss titled Driving Lessons. Not to be confused with the British coming-of-age movie starring Harry Potter's Rupert Grint, this Driving Lessons is about "a troubled family who gets a second chance at happiness when the mother (Davis) suffers a memory loss and can't recall the last 15 years of her life."

That synopsis sounds a bit sad to me. It sounds like the family did something unforgivable to the mother but now they can celebrate thanks to her amnesia. Sure, Mom suffers, but at least they all have a second chance at good times. I guess memory loss is often the subject of laughs and duplicity. Think Overboard. Think 50 First Dates. Think Good Bye, Lenin! -- sort of. Don't it all just make you want to maybe knock your mother or girlfriend or a rich lady you want to pretend is your mom or girlfriend in the head in the hope she'll receive a blank slate? OK, well don't it at least make you want to watch another movie about something akin to that? Driving Lessons was scripted by Mark Lisson (Return to Horror High) and will be helmed by Finnish director Vivi Friedman. Shooting begins in March.

What are The Nines? I have no idea, but I think The Eights are koala bears. That's about as close as you'll get to answers in this film, screenwriter John August's directorial debut, but don't let that deter you -- this is one of the most fun, most brain-twistingly clever films of the year. It's at once a serious meditation on the responsibilities of creators, a light-hearted poke at people in the entertainment industry who apply life-or-death stakes to everything that happens to them, and a metaphysical meditation on exactly what constitutes reality. Is television reality? The characters certainly seem to think so. Who are we to tell them they aren't real? And what about our creator? Do we have one? If so, what would that creator think about what we're up to, and how would they go about inserting themselves into the everyday world to get a closer look? What guise would they use? The Nines is a movie that raises about six million major, thought-provoking questions but then holds back on answering most of them.

The film is structured as a three-part anthology, with three actors -- Ryan Reynolds, Melissa McCarthy, and Hope Davis -- playing different characters in each part. Part 1 has Reynolds playing a capricious Hollywood actor who totals his car and ends up being put under house arrest in his gigantic Hollywood home -- some punishment, right? Going stir-crazy under the watchful eye of his ultra-chipper publicist, played by McCarthy, Reynolds' character becomes enamored with a sultry next-door neighbor, played by Davis, and starts to challenge his house arrest. Part 2 is a more autobiographical section, with Reynolds playing a television executive fighting to keep his pet project in development while also submitting to the demands of a Project Greenlight-style reality show, starring him. Davis plays a cold-hearted network executive in this piece, while McCarthy plays a thinly-disguised version of herself, acting out a version of her own past experiences with August. Part 3 is a self-contained story, starring Reynolds and McCarthy as a couple with a child, lost in the woods -- Davis plays a mysterious jogger. Still with me?

Hope Davis has had a pretty remarkably consistent career considering the amount of work she's done, giving understated performances in a variety of great films. I loved her in two recent little-seen gems: The Matador and The Weather Man, and especially in American Splendor and About Schmidt -- which is one of my favorite films. She's got two movies due out this year: John August's The Nines, which I told you a bit about here, and Charlie Bartlett, a comedy with Robert Downey, Jr, due out August 3rd. Today brings more word on two upcoming projects for Davis. First, she has joined Synecdoche, New York, screenwriter extraordinaire Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut. Philip Seymour Hoffman will star and Davis joins an excellent (and very pale!) female supporting cast that includes Samantha Morton, Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, and Tilda Swinton. Hoffman will play "a theater director in crisis over work and the women in his life," Davis will play his therapist. Synecdoche begins shooting this month.

After that project wraps, Davis will move on to Genova, a new film from Michael Winterbottom, director of the great Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story and 24 Hour Party People. Winterbottom also directed Angelina Jolie in A Mighty Heart, out this summer -- check out James' Cannes review of that film here. Monika told you about Davis' addition to the Genova cast last week. That film is a ghost story said to have mystery and horror elements. It tells the story of "a British man who moves with his two American daughters to Italy as he tries to recover from his wife's death." Davis will star alongside Colin Firth, Willa Holland of The OC and Perla Haney-Jardine of Spider-Man 3. Catherine Keener is in that one as well -- maybe she and Davis can share a cab from New York to Italy after the Kaufman film wraps.

I have to say that I love Michael Winterbottom's range. It's not every man who Welcome to Sarajevo, The Claim, 24 Hour Party People, A Cock and Bull Story, 9 Songs and A Mighty Heart on their resume. Not to mention the fact that he's trucking along with the movie making. He's got the upcoming Angelina Jolie flick, A Mighty Heart, on the way, as well as another true-story, overseas production, Murder in Samarkand, in the works. But in between the political turmoil, Winterbottom is looking into a ghostly story named Genova, as Christopher Campbell alerted us about in November.

The film is about a man who loses his wife and moves to Italy with his teen daughters, while suffering from haunting ghosts of his past. Colin Firth has been with the project for a while, but now the rest of the cast has been fleshed out. His co-stars are The Weather Man's Hope Davis and The 40 Year Old Virgin love interest Catherine Keener, and presumably one of them will be the wife who widowed him. As for his daughters, I assume they are the next two in the cast -- teen actress Willa Holland, who played Kaitlin Cooper on The O.C., and Perla Haney-Jardine, who was most recently Penny Marko in Spider-Man 3. Of course, Winterbottom says of the choices: "I am very excited about working with such wonderful actors in such a beautiful city. It is a story I have been working on for a while." The movie will begin shooting at the end of next month in, of course, Genova, Italy, as well as Boston. But I agree with Campbell -- I'm hoping gets back to the comedies before he gets into a drama groove.

 

Pierce Brosnan wakes with a start. He begins to survey the high-design hotel room in which he'd passed out, and notices first a half-empty bottle of Maker's Mark on the nightstand, and then, a purple-toenailed brunette asleep in the bed beside him. After examining the sleeping gal's feet like a dick on a case, he snatches up her purse and empties it out on the bed. He finds what he's looking for. He plucks the bottle of violet polish and sets to work on his own toes.

Not the typical morning ritual of the man you once knew as James Bond, for sure, but in its very vulgarity as both a complex personality sketch and as a simple joke, this scene seems to say a lot about what's wrong withThe Matador, acquired by the Weinsteins a year ago at Sundance and scheduled, with little explanation, for what seems suspiciously like an end-of-year burn-off release. The problem, in short: novelty and quality can sometimes be mutually exclusive.The Matador is one of those indie-in-name-only films, full of name stars and expensive effects shots and just enough coarse writing to ensure a festival run, that goes out of its way to prove that it doesn't "play by the rules", whilst simultaneously seeming unable to accomplish anything particularly anarchic, or even very interesting. If this is the kind of thing Brosnan is playing to spend his post-Bond capital on, one imagines he won't have a wallet full of currency for very long.