Heights

Lee pretty much summed it up: Forgettable. I just know that if you ask me about this movie a month from now, I won’t have a clue what it was about. It’s based on a play by Amy Fox, a first-time playwright, and some of the cast are great. Glenn Close (no surprise) and Elizabeth Banks are very good. It’s nice to see George Segal again … whatever happened to him? (I heard coke.) Isabella Rossellini makes an appearance for about sixty seconds. The rest of the cast all look like generic New York male models, I had a hard time telling one from another. The plot was some ho-hum business about a man trying to deny his homosexuality. Sorry, my gay friends, this situation has been done to death, and Ms. Fox has nothing new to say about it.

(Second review. I forgot I saw it, just as I predicted!) Glenn Close is an Oscar-winning director who also works on the stage. I’d say she’s playing the Meryl Streep part, but that’s not very nice, it is? Besides, she is a stone diva and a world-class man chaser. The casting couch can work in the other direction; if you are a hunky young male you pretty much have to sleep with her to get a good part.

Her daughter, the lovely girl-next-door Elizabeth Banks, is a photographer who is about to get married to a young lawyer, but he has a gay skeleton in his closet. A few years ago he had an affair with a total jerk photographer (who we never see) known for always sleeping with his male models. Now some old photos have come to light in a new exhibition, photos the jerk promised would never be shown.

This might not have been an insuperable obstacle to the marriage, but it turns out he’s never really stopped. He still has a long-term male lover. In the end, it doesn’t even seem likely that he’s bisexual, he’s just kidding himself.

In fact, there really isn’t a straight male character here. The story takes place among the fashionable people in New York, whom there are no people on the planet any phonier, and it’s all very well written and acted, and I enjoyed it for that. In fact, I was quite caught up in the story, and felt for all these people trying to sort out this awful situation. But I won’t be seeing it again. (Jesus, I hope not!)