The Other Woman (2011)

A Masterpiece!

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

The characters in this story are incredibly complex. Lisa Kudrow delivers a surprisingly good performance as the bitter, angry ex wife. Natalie Portman is great as she always is. She delivers a role that is snarky, cute and even heartbreaking at times. It is difficult to feel pity for a person who caused a divorce but the combination of Natalie Portman's and Lisa Kudrow's performances makes it easier than one might expect. The Other Woman is frustrating at times as you want to jump into the movie and slap sense into a couple of people. The emotional struggles each character goes through during the course of this film is well depicted. The dysfunctional family is best depicted in William's picture of his family.The ultimate horror of this movie has any viewer feel terrible for Natalie Portman as she was the cause for any new parent's worst nightmare. The reveal of what she did makes the way she acted throughout the movie much more understandable as it seemed to be slightly confusing that she would be so much more affected than anyone else in the film. The composition of songs feels a little bit TV movie. The orchestrated score used for background music at times in this film feels cheesy at best. I liked the movie but it was a bit depressing and tough to watch at times. I would recommend watching this movie to some people but not everyone. It is a tough watch as there are so many different emotions the viewer is put through. Lastly, Charlie Tahan is perfect for that role! He shines in the ice skating scene. Finally, the room gets a little bit "dusty" toward the end as Lisa Kudrow's character makes up for her actions throughout the movie. Tough scene. But this scene is immediately trumped when Emilia gives William a boat. That entire sequence is beautiful and probably the perfect way to finish this movie. Well done!

The Other Woman (2009)You might put up with this glaringly mediocre film by seeing how it deals with things that matter to ordinary people. Ordinary very rich people. It's about relationships, about wanting a child and having that go wrong, about taking care of someone else's child. It's about cheating and being in love and falling out of love. I mean, it's all good stuff.But the writing is routine to the point of deadening. The filming (photography) is either routine or it strives in little ways to be "interesting" by moving or gliding, but for no real reason except to keep it from being static. The acting is solid but unexceptional, including the main performance by a good Natalie Portman. The music is saccharine, at least against the backdrop of these events, as if trying to inflate them.Yes, this is an annoying movie if you pay attention to how it is made. If you are just watching for what happens, it's fine, but frankly just a bit boring. And besides Portman, the main star is, in some ways, the boy who is shuttled between parents and stepparents, and he's weirdly unsympathetic (on purpose). There are little moments that are meant to be intensely personal, and yet they seem like they're "meant" to do that. It doesn't emerge from events, or from character.Ugh. I know many people will see this and like a lot of it. Good! It's not on the surface too bad, I know that. But the more I watched the more it got under my skin like lice.

Natalie Portman delivers an astonishing character study as Emilia Greenleaf a woman who has, in her own words, broken one marriage, and seems unable to stop herself breaking her own following the death of her three day old baby. We see her demise through her relationships with William (Tahan), her husband Jack (Cohen), and his first wife Carolyn (Kudrow). When Portman is on screen with William the film seems to move in a believable direction and yet with Jack and with Carolyn, alone or together something seems not quite as understandably real.At first I wanted to blame a lack of chemistry between Portman and Cohen and yet there are tender moments seemingly nullifying my questions about their relationship. Charlie Tahan is excellent throughout and so I am left with a question mark against the casting of Jack and Carolyn, or, perhaps, the screenplay involving them. Portman's character is simply played out as a determined and privileged young woman who cannot cope with being denied what she really wants and needs above all else - to be seen as the person she thinks she is and not the woman she really is. Her defensiveness is seen in many of the scenes Portman delivers which is why I consider her performance as astonishingly accurate and I just wish the flaws elsewhere could have been better handled.Although there is a rewarding end to this film, a catharsis if you wish it to be one, it still leaves a feeling that you have watched an unfinished work, one which could and should have delivered so much more from the characters around Emilia. Perhaps, at heart, the film cannot get beyond a feeling of superficiality that surrounds some of the plot, which is a pity because it could have been so much better.

Inevitably seeing this movie brought to mind another with a similar title, "Love And other Drugs", which was released later but I saw first. As well as titles with the same three first words, both films are based on a book (in this case a successful novel by Ayelet Waldman), are scripted by the director (in this instance, Don Roos), have an attractive and young lead actress (in this one, Natalie Portman), and deal with challenging social issues (this time, step-parenting and infant mortality). However, where "..Drugs" was a romantic comedy, "..Impossible Pursuits" has less romance and very little comedy. In fact, at times it is quite harrowing.It works because of an intelligent script (although the dialogue is sometimes hard to follow) and some fine acting, not just from Portman - who is excellent - but Scott Cohen as her husband, Lisa Kudrow as the ex-wife, and Charlie Tahan as the troubled child of the first marriage. Many films set in New York include scenes in Central Park, but here the location is particularly well used, especially in a silent walk to remember the deaths of the unborn or newly born. The soundtrack too neatly complements the action in a work that is well worth viewing as a contrast to the standard rom-com.