Refined and beautifully played, much like the chamber music that it features, A Late Quartet is decidedly grown-up fare.
Yet despite its polite exterior amongst the rarefied folk of Manhattan's classical world, its themes of friendship, parenthood, personal sacrifice, illness and the passage of time make it positively bristle with life.
The Fugue String Quartet is preparing for its 25th anniversary concert when its eldest member, cellist Peter Mitchell (Christopher Walken), is diagnosed with early Parkinson's Disease. He informs his colleagues that this next concert will be his last, and recommends a replacement. It's a sad, yet simple way forward, but his news brings years of discontent and tension within the group to the surface.
Robert Gelbart (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is frustrated with playing second violin (as he sees it, second fiddle) to first violinist Daniel Lerner (Mark Ivanir), and demands they swap chairs. Violist Juliette (Catherine Keener), Robert's wife, sides with the austere Daniel in thinking this a terrible idea. Hubby is none too pleased. Their discord isn't helped by Daniel and Juliette's romantic history, or by developments involving the Gelbarts' feisty daughter Alexandra (Imogen Poots), also a talented violinist.
These people are perfectionists, and not wholly likeable for it, their exactitude extending to every detail of everyday life, from making a cup of coffee or a bed to ensuring that undue emotion is kept in check, lest it get in the way of rehearsals. It's inevitable that a curveball such as Peter's would throw the whole thing out of synch.
Peter is the calmest of the four. An inspirational teacher, he explains to his students the particular demands of Beethoven's Opus 131, a lengthy piece that the composer insisted be played without breaks.
The result, says Peter, is that each instrument will fall out of tune at some point, but while playing the musicians have time to adjust to each other's aberrations. The lesson is clearly a metaphor for the quartet itself, yet now they have lost their ability to adjust.
It's such a treat to hear Walken – whose voice is arguably the most divine instrument on display – speaking without his trademark menace or quirkiness, as a tangible human being. While the other characters test our patience, Walken's Peter, facing a terrible end to life as he's known it (and an end to all that perfection) is quietly heartbreaking.
Hoffman is the other stand-out performer, as a man thwarted as both artist and husband who can no longer contain his emotions. Director Yaron Zilberman does a good job of tuning his cast, while laying on a seductive Beethoven primer.
In stark contrast, film director, producer, screenwriter and author Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers is a film about and for the young, set in a hedonistic Florida resort, driven by rap music and centring on four girls (including Disney stars Vanessa Hudgens and Selena Gomez) enjoying a debauched spring break from college whom we rarely see out of their bikinis.
With Kids, Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy, Korine has a reputation for independent films that capture marginal lives. This feels like a departure to the mainstream.
As the film lasciviously lingers on the drink and drug-fuelled holiday shenanigans, it's at first as shallow and unappealing as its misguided young naïfs. Then a gangster takes them under his wing and events take a darker, more interesting turn.
After his bland outing as the Wizard of Oz last month, it's good to see James Franco back on form. With his dreadlocks, silver teeth and tattoos, his creepy but goofy gangster is quite spellbinding, as he leads the girls to a coming-of-age finale that plays like Miami Vice in swimsuits and pink balaclavas.
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