I love New York as much as the next fellow. I love New York films more than the fellow next to him. But the natives’ passion for their city is too often at a level that, if occurring between people, might generate a stern restraining order.
Set largely in the West Village at Christmastime, David Siegel and Scott McGehee’s adaptation of a popular novel by Sigrid Nunez is a case in point. Everyone wears the most glorious woollens. All dinner parties are alive with the most intelligent talk. Does the film end with a gentle surge of the Rodgers and Hart song Manhattan? As sure as it’s still very fancy on old Delancey Street it does.
Not much else curmudgeonly can be said about a lovely film that, after a few career ups and downs, reminds us how engaging Naomi Watts can be in the right role. She plays Iris, a university lecturer (and sometime writer) who, after the suicide of a mentor, ends up with an unwanted legacy that could disrupt her comfortable if solitary life by Washington Square Park.
The mentor is, in flashback and semi-ghostly return, Bill Murray as no sort of great American writer I can think of. He’s not brash enough for Norman Mailer. He’s not surly enough for JD Salinger. He’s not hip enough for Thomas Pynchon.
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The legacy is a stubborn but gentle great dane named Apollo. His occupation of Iris’s bed is one thing. The landlord’s threat to evict her if he isn’t gone by the day before yesterday is altogether a more serious matter. You know what New Yorkers are like about their “rent-controlled” apartments.
Giles Nuttgens’s camera shamelessly fashions a Manhattan winter wonderland that Woody Allen might savour. There is no pretence we are in anything like the real world here. This is an environment where beautiful people live comfortable lives with only faint fears that they may have to (quelle horreur!) relocate to the modestly fashionable end of Brooklyn.
But Murray and Watts make something genuinely touching of Iris’s quest to discover what prompted the writer to end it all. And the newcomer Bing could hardly be more charming as the dog whose presence causes her to confront what’s missing in her own life.
How does the closing number go? “A wondrous toy just made for a girl and boy”. I’ll buy that.
In cinemas from Friday, April 25th
