Nicole Holofcener
3/5
Enough said doesnt do what a lot of modern Romantic Dramedies do in taking two mid-tier actors and confronting them with a far fetched premise. Instead here they take two great performers who have good on-screen chemistry and give them a far fetched premise. In a sense its like the best Meg Ryan movie shes never been in. The late great Gandolfini plays a version of his alternate dimension amazingly compelling story-thread guy Kevin Finnerty from the immortal Sopranos with his Albert character. He displays his range, and for the most part you never really feel like he is going to get physically threatening. This goes against the notion that after Sopranos he would forever be type-cast as the mob-boss with mommy issues (wow that is a wicked generalization isn't it?). It was ultimately unfair to typecast Gandolfini because he really did have a lot of other weapons in his arsenal. He brought the threatening force in films like
True Romance or
Killing Them Softly but then he would bring deliver more subdued but more elaborate characters in
Where the Wild Things Are and
Zero Dark Thirty. Here he is a man still exhausted from a toxic marriage. He is more than ready to move on and put the past nightmare behind him. It's really his wife who continues to beat his idiosyncrasies into the ground, without him there. Sometimes it almost feels like she's still married to him, but a ghost of him, after he's eagerly moved on with the next chapter of his life (not looking back either) and is no longer a physical presence in the house. The one thing that brings the two of them together is the fact that they are both at the same point in their lives: divorced, cynical, and raising college-aged kids.
Julia Louis-Dreyfuses character Eva is a bit more challenging. She has a healthier relationship with her ex, who has his own HBO background with the much short-lived forgotten-but-great Carnivale. But her relationship with her daughter Ellen (Tracey Fairaway) is befuddling and not really well laid-out. You know that there is tension between the two, and then there's a leap to Eva spending more time with Ellen's best friend. There isn't a lot in between that. And there probably should be. But at the end of the day, it's excusable and not really that important. What's more important is the chemistry between Eva and Albert feels real. It's a nice send-off for Gandolfini, even if it's not his last film (two more in post-production as of June of 2014).
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