Teringer
An Exercise In Nonsense
Crwthod
A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.
Yvonne Jodi
Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.
orson-13
Patrick Wilson seems born to these sensitive professional male roles that require a rethinking of the smooth path the character is on. Director Tracey Hecht has a firm hand on an interesting and large cast and her script meshes the characters deftly,creating some drama without knocking heads. The film is realistically and interestingly placed within the world of architectural design and construction while at the same time offering an older New York office milieu kind of story. Without being cliché wealthy types, the main characters are likable genteel professionals on the way up, but reconsidering some avenues of personal and professional fulfillment. Amy Smart is charming, Wilson spot on, and Lynn Collins solid. Cinematography is excellent as are sets and locations. It's a truly unpretentious film and so may not be exciting enough for some.
MBunge
I once read a comment from Jim Shooter, the former Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Comics, that it was okay to tell a "day in the life" story as long as it was about the day you discovered penicillin or saved the world from an alien invasion. There's some truth to that. Heaven knows a lot of storytellers love to wallow in the mundane, keeping it real or getting all meta or something. Every so often, though, it's nice to experience a film that isn't about people getting killed or boy getting plot-hammered together with girl while a joke goes off every 20 seconds. At less than 80 minutes long, Life in Flight manages to satisfy that craving without overstaying its welcome.Will Sargent (Patrick Wilson) is a New York City architect with a constantly aggravating construction project on one hand and a constantly striving wife (Amy Smart) on the other. Will is on track to merge his company with a larger, ritzier firm. His wife is happy about that. Will…not so much. He has mostly consigned himself to it, until he meets Kate (Lynn Collins). She's a designer herself and the two of them click from almost the first words they speak to each other. While Will and his wife are living in different emotional hemispheres, it's like he and Kate are next door neighbors. Kate thinks there's something going on between them while Will tries not to admit that to himself. Then she finds out he's married and the day comes when he has to sign the merger papers and both of them are forced to stop living their lives the way other people want them to.Patrick Wilson and Lynn Collins are both elegantly normal. Yes, the drama of their characters isn't like they're living in a war zone or trying to escape from a horde of zombies, but they let us see it's as important to Will and Kate as all our dramas are to us. Nobody else except Amy Smart really has more than an extended cameo in the movie, so the whole shebang rests of Wilson and Collins making us care about Will and Kate. They succeed by diving into the somewhat shallow waters of two people who are unhappy without having much cause to be and making the viewer feel the commonplace depth of his or her own life.Now, I wouldn't say everything works here. Kate invests a whole lot of emotion into a guy she barely flirts with. You also can't escape the realization at the end of Life in Flight that you've watched the world's most sympathetic view of a guy going through a midlife crisis where the film ends just as he's about to start cheating on his wife. I'm not sure if it was intentional but it made me stop and reevaluate how I felt about the whole thing. And while Amy Smart plays a bitch whose bitchiness is beautifully calibrated to a inch before something Will would feel entitled to object to, the two of them are so out of sync it's hard to believe they would have ever had a second date, let alone got married and had a child.If you're looking for a distraction, this probably isn't it. It you'd like a mirror to help you see your own life a bit more clearly, take a look at Life in Flight.
sfmoe
I liked this movie. The dialogue felt natural, the conversations unforced and believable. The story explores, in a subtle, non-judgmental way, two people at an emotional crossroads. The wife didn't strike me as shrewish, but rather as oriented to success, not the best match for her husband, who was more reflective, more questioning. I've been there in my own way, so I can relate. I liked the ending. Like the rest of the movie, it felt natural, unforced, organic. The casting was good, with the exception of Fred Weller, who is distractingly obnoxious, which, according to what I've seen him in so far, seems to be his default role. In spite of that, this quiet study made me think, and do some questioning of my own.
eggboy
Saw this at Tribeca Film Festival and was surprised by the wretched writing. The cast is professional, and the photography, set and production design are all first class. The problem is a script that presents a somewhat dopey male lead, an unredeemable monster (b*tch) of a wife, and a seven-year-itch scenario.The result is good actors reciting bad lines in overwrought scenes. We bought these tickets expecting that a cast including Patrick Wilson, Amy Smart and several other fine actors would deliver a good result. Tied to that script, they couldn't stay afloat.The movie inspires me to create a new rule for young filmmakers: don't write a script with an architect as your main character, unless you are remaking "The Fountainhead." And don't remake "The Fountainhead."
