Love Liza Review
by Karina Montgomery (karina AT cinerina DOT com)March 27th, 2003
Love Liza
This Film Is Not Yet Rated
The short review: I deeply admired Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance as Wilson, but I cannot say that I "enjoyed" the film. Like About Schmidt, Love Liza centers on one man's emotional journey after a horrible shock. It is far less verbal and chatty than About Schmidt, with significantly less comic relief, and lots and lots more terrible coping mechanisms. In fact, there is barely any dialogue at all, and no voice over. You get lots of chance to listen to the score, which is interesting and different. Hoffman is evocative with his face; he does not need to speak to tell us what he means. His obsessive hobby-chasing (both the legitimate and the hallucinogenic sort) is totally comprehensible. What he's hiding from is in his pocket all along, and watching a man have such terror of a little envelope (signed, Love Liza) is actually quite painful to witness.
The long review has eluded me since I saw the film. While Hoffman is in practically every frame, and carries the movie so effortlessly that we don't even notice the magnitude of it, he is carrying a very slow, deliberately off kilter tale of a man whom we are not meant to understand. This can be an obstacle to a viewer, never mind a reviewer. I believed him. I believed his pain, his fear, his escape, his ups and his downs. I could see by his shamble how intoxicated he was, I really felt like I was being carried along in his pocket along with the envelope containing the title, and it was so personal and so painfulbut still very remote. How this can be, I can only attribute to my (fortunate) ignorance of that level of grief and helplessness. I hope it's just me, because the shots were gorgeous and Hoffman deserves some recognition for what he always does so well.
You may notice a distinct lack of content in this review, and honestly, coming up with 450 words is going to be nigh on impossible. It's more like an incredible, richly detailed photograph than a movie, capturing many significant details simultaneously, flickers of meaning appearing in the composition, in the expression, but not much of a journey, in that 4th dimensional sense that we expect from film. It's so internal a journey, and we are left outside of his true mind by Wilson's inexplicable refusal to read the letter, that we stand still, waiting for him to come to us, for all 93 minutes of the film. Is it only 93 minutes? Events unfold, raw emotion seems out of his pores, never really getting the real release we (as well as Wilson) need. The whole movie could have been subtitled "portrait of avoidance" and it would have drawn more intelligent sounding "ummmm" and "yessss" from the audience. Overall, it was unsatisfying, but there was not enough of it to pick apart and say "here, yes, this is why I was unsatisfied." Needless to say, I saw it weeks ago and can barely get these words down. Hoffman is brilliant but his vehicle is unworthy.
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These reviews (c) 2003 Karina Montgomery. Please feel free to forward but just credit the reviewer in the text. Thanks.
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