The granite-jawed writer is a romantic cliche — that writer/director Sally Potter here incisively anatomizes with a view to freeing woman from that conventional enslavement. She exposes macho romance as helplessness.
Javier Bardem is usually the dynamic force of his film. Here his Leo (the ex-lion) leaves his bedroom stupor either for a romantic reminiscence or to fumble through the unaccommodating reality of New York City. He takes roads into memories of past romance and failure, then in reality stumbles helpless through the streets.
As his second wife observes, Leo chooses to live in a dump by the railway tracks. He's off the rails.
His first wife (Salma Hayak) lost him to their grief over a school-bound son killed in a traffic accident. In his trauma he sees his lost son in dogs. His second wife (Laura Linney) escaped when neither could handle her becoming the far more successful. Their detachment still leaves them friends, at least in her view, but he blurs their distance.
The film centers on Leo’s relationship with their daughter Molly. In the present tense the film follows her laborious caring for him, as she struggles to get him to and through improbable dental and optometrist appointments, a replacement pants purchase, and his survival of a nocturnal wandering. Her attempts at normalcy fail.
When her attention to him costs her an important job she resolves finally to assert her independence.
The title involves them all. Leo floats to and from fantasies or memories of his lost desires. His pathetic flirtation with a young girl in Greece could be a fantasy temptation or a reworking of his flight from his newborn daughter for a writing freedom in Greece, that he quickly abandoned.
The first wife could not follow him further through his insistent grief. They share road scenes literal and figurative.The second wife sees his present clutch as the road she did well to escape.
The character who grows through the film is daughter Molly. She comes to realize the costs of her father’s grip and climactically walks away to independence, leaving him with the warmth of her care. And of course a hired caregiver.
But Molly can’t walk that road away until her father finally recognizes her, finally speaks her name. That acknowledgment enables her split. Literally.
Finally, credit Potter with a rich work of technical excellence as well as imagination and commitment, with uniformly fine performances.
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