carline23

Downtown Owl (2023)

Two words: hot mess

I wanted like this film, I really did. But there is something to be said for, "just because you can, doesn't mean you should" here, all the way around.

Age swapping Julia and Naomi in order to allow Lily Rabe to star and "showcase her acting" was not wise. Most of her scenes I found completely over the top, the breakdown on the football field was not a "career best", it was straight up embarrassing. Julia was in her 20s in the book, fresh out of college with no where else to go, and that setup works so much better than the concept of a 40-year-old woman moving across country to a tiny town for a single semester because her husband is working on his thesis?!

So much of the story felt incomplete, and yet somehow managed to be so boring at the same time. 41 minutes in and I paused the film to see how much time was left and then groaned to discover there was a lot more to go. Too many characters were thrown in for inclusions sake because they were in the book, like Naomi's faux "boyfriend" Ted, who really had zero purpose except to tell her at the end that she's not a good listener. Justice for Ted, he deserved better. The high school kids were the best part of the movie, and they were all so underdeveloped. Why bother creating these secondary characters for little to no reason?

I have so many questions about the directors' choices on what to add/subtract from the original plot. Why was the coach having a torrid affair with a student made such a central point and how is it realistic that the whole town just accepts that he does this repeatedly? It amounts to absolutely nothing. No resolution, no Laidlaw getting his. And Julia proclaiming, "but what if she really loves him?!" Yikes.

All the criticisms I've read from professionals are spot on. The tone is all over the place, weird 4th wall breaks that do not work, cartoons and hot pink type thrown in, and no, the directors claiming they just "like weird" and the rest of us "don't get it", is not a valid reason. The entire blizzard scene, the climax of the film: dramatic music, weird monologuing and ultimately changing the original ending...was it supposed to be so bad it was silly?! I honestly could not tell. "I'm saving your life, man!" Cringe.

These two should really just focus on their own acting careers rather than keep trying to force this 2fer to happen. It never goes well. As someone on letterboxd said, no one self-sabotages their career better than Lily Rabe and subsequently, Hamish Linklater's.