Fridae

This belated indie drama is another strong addition to workhorse Natalie Portman’s recent prolific bout: hot on the heels of No Strings Attached and Black Swan, with Thor, Your Highness and Hesher still in the pipeline, one thing no one can argue against is that Portman has indeed come into the big time as an actress.

Portman arguably plays her most interesting character so far in all her movies to be released this year. Her Emilia Greenleaf is a law firm associate and the “other woman” in the marriage of law firm partner Jack Wolff (Scott Cohen) and his wife, obstetrician Carolyn Soule (Lisa Kudrow). Jack falls hard for her and she for Jack, just as Jack’s marriage is on the rocks. Eventually they marry and Emilia also becomes stepmother to Jack’s young son William (Charlie Tahan). Yet their marriage is troubled from the get-go immediately by Emilia’s loss of her baby daughter Isabel, and the continued series of vicious and judgmental attacks made on her by the controlling, unlikable Carolyn.

Portman handled the role of Emilia with her usually earnestness and technical proficiency in a movie that deliberately makes Emilia not too likable. That Portman visibly tries so hard to make her likable actually succeeds in accentuating Emilia’s faults - namely shallowness and self-centredness - when they rise to the surface. Emilia is the sort of person who sees everyone around her solely in the role that she has designated them in, just as she spends much of her time wallowing in and banging her head against the wall to find some justification and explanation for her misfortunes, which she seems to feel are greater than anyone else’s. Her attachment to her own grief and her own guilt make her often blind to seeing the good in others, and in assessing her own faults.

A couple of special mentions however, have to go to Lisa Kudrow and Charlie Tahan. Kudrow’s precisely tuned performances displays a split-second timing that shows her roots as a comedienne. Her Carolyn is often bitter, controlling, vicious and judgmental in nearly all of her scenes almost to the point of being comically so, but the one scene where she shows genuine grief and empathy that hits like a slap across the face in getting us to question our assumptions about her character. Charlie Tahan steals the show almost as much as the precocious, smart-mouthed William, who like most children of his age and social milieu, is both sophisticated and innocent. He is a movie kid who is not a display item of cuteness or tartness the way most movie kids tend to be.

Love and other Impossible Pursuits’ mouthful of a title gets a better and more profound treatment in the US with it simply being The Other Woman , since really the movie’s about how everyone’s an “other” in everyone else’s eyes, of how too often we choose to pigeonhole or judge others too harshly and fail to see things from their point of view. Emilia is an “other woman” in a marriage, but the film is also about her change and maturity into “an-other” woman as she learns of how we all need empathy to get along even as we find that we often have little choice but to tolerate each other’s faults, but sometimes everything just works out okay.

A gentle, sweet romantic dramedy driven by strong performances, including another good turn from workhorse Natalie Portman, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits offers its fair share of laughter, tears and life lessons delivered with a gentle, nudging hand.