Such a shame James Gandolfini’s near-last movie had to be the lifeless Enough Said (trailer). The acting is fine, but the dialog is awful. And at the crisis moment, when he asks the heroine why she did what she did, the writer drew a blank, leaving poor Julia Louis Dreyfus to just shrug. So much for motivation. As reviewer Nathan Rabin said, “Enough Said is afflicted with a terminal case of what Roger Ebert dubbed ‘The Idiot Plot,’ in which a single reasonable sentence uttered in a rational tone could easily, diplomatically resolve the film’s core conflict.” Actually painful to watch.
As is so often the case with Hollywood, what these two see in each other is another blank—they laugh a lot, or she does—and she has to be a pretty dumb cluck not to question some of the received opinions about him. Her friends—Toni Collette and Ben Falcone—are a mysterious couple, who stay together because . . . actually, I can’t figure out why. Collette, it turns out, is a therapist, but displays no insight into her friend’s relationship or why she herself keeps rearranging her furniture. Same house, same furniture, same husband.
Rotten Tomatoes rating: an unbelievable 96, which I have to believe reflected the reviewers’ respect for Gandolfini in roles other than this one. Among audience members—generally more forgiving—only 78 percent liked it.
P.S. Maybe in Hollywood, they still call a woman “masseuse,” but everywhere else it’s “massage therapist.”
