I have been waiting for this film for months. I saw early reviews of it when it first came out, but have had to wait until it was released to DVD/Bluray and thus become available on the Piratenet to see it. I had an immediate "hit" on it when I first read about it, and that intuition seems to have been -- at least for me and my family, who all watched it together tonight -- to have been well-founded.
It's that rarest of the rare these days, a family drama/comedy that is willing to leave the drama at the front door and focus on the comedy and the family. The basic plot concerns an uptight New York City lawyer (Catherine Keener) who is informed by her even more uptight New York City husband (Kyle MacLachlan) that he wants a divorce. She packs up the BMW 4WD with some belongings and her two kids (played by Nat Wolff and Elizabeth Olsen) and goes off to Woodstock, NY to hide out for a while with the mother she hasn't spoken to in 20 years. Uptight lawyer lady dumped her all those years ago because she was such a hippie, and still is. She arrives on Mom's doorstep and immediately demands that she keep her pot-smoking, free love ways in her pants during the visit, so as not to adversely affect the youngun's. This is not to be. Why I got such a hit on this film, besides the fact that it is directed by the estimable Bruce Beresford, is his choice of who to play Hippie Mom. None other than Jane Fonda, in her first starring role in a film in decades. She has never been more brilliant -- as an actress, as a woman, and as a larger-than-life persona. Yes, it's a light romantic comedy, but Jane just ROCKS. Not to mention the fact that she looks better at 74 than most women look at 44. Part of the magic of this may be that Jane Fonda, as she has admitted in the press run-ups to the release of this film, never *was* a hippie. Although that may have been her image, especially among uptight Republicans, she was always far too intellectual and far too uptight to ever live like her character in this film. So this movie gives her an opportunity to send up the popular but untrue image of herself. Another part is that in this film Jane Fonda is *generous* in the way that 74-year-old actresses can afford to be. She allows Catherine Keener, whose film this really is, to take it and run with it. She equally allows Elizabeth Olsen (sister to the "Olsen twins," but a much better actress) to do the same. The smaller supporting characters are all wonderful, as is the "character" played by Woodstock itself. A delight. If you need a break from the trials of the world, this film might provide you with one. http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi3109659417/ <http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi3109659417/>
