Anyways Which Way But Loose

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I had Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret on my brain anyway because I caught some of it again over the weekend, but I think it might have come to mind watching Xavier Dolan's new film Laurence Anyways even if I hadn't because they're both very long very messy films which are ultimately just small-focused character studies... writ epic. Margaret is a better film - its sloppiness eventually benefits and rounds it out it in ways that Laurence more often just feels redundant or aimless. But Laurence aims high, and as with Dolan's other films it more than once smacks the face of greatness, too.

Best thing he's got here are a whole bunch of very good performances - Melvil Poupaud and especially Suzanne Clement do very good work charting the ups and downs and ups and downs and ups and downs and ups and downs of Laurence and Fred's relationship as the former transitions himself to a herself. Clement especially - there's a stand up and cheer scene in a diner where she loses it on a bewigged waitress who finds herself a mite too clever. I also loved Nathalie Baye's performance as Laurence's monstrously complicated mother - the times when Dolan's camera just rested on her face as all of the emotions there have ever been ran across it were entrancing.

But it's too much of too many things, the movie - although they added a hefty dosage of Almodovarian humor you could have eighty-sixed the whole octogenarian transsexual sideshow and not missed them a bit (although then I wouldn't have gotten to write "octogenarian transsexual sideshow" and I would have missed that). Dolan often gives in to his more excessive flourishes and sometimes they stick, but just as often they just stick out.
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