A Late Quartet (2012)

Best movie ever!

Absolutely the worst movie.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Who would have thought that self-absorbed classical musicians could be so attractive to women? The second violinist is a bedhopper, sleeping around with a young fan (do quartets really have groupies?) while his wife, the viola player, is away, although she inevitably finds out. Their daughter, meanwhile, initiates an affair with the first violinist Daniel, who of course, is 'brilliant'. Not that we ever see him doing anything brilliant, but we are told he is.All this may remind you of the implausibly complex relationships of the old comedy series 'Soap'. Here however it is played in deadly earnest.The music over the opening credits gave me an early red flag of the empty melodrama to come. Instead of quartet music or something composed in the same spirit, an insipid orchestral piece is heard. This music gets more saccharine as the film progresses.The second violinist, when not bed hopping, is getting a bit tired of -ahem- playing second fiddle. Although he has been doing this successfully for 25 years.He's also angry that the brilliant Daniel does not want to play without the score in front of them. Although he has been doing this successfully for 25 years.So we have this brilliant musician who never takes any risks but is still brilliant and plays to packed auditoriums.Obviously this is a lot of clichés strung together and never really rises above it. But the main problem is a lack of resolution of any of its themes. The viola player leaves the 2nd fiddler, the 2nd fiddler punches Daniel, the viola player discovers her daughter's affair with Daniel, yet none of this is really resolved. We merely see the quartet playing together at the end and, to slushy music, in a scene designed to inspire us, they close the score. Wow. That's revelatory! The one good part of this is Walken's role as a cellist coming to terms with his incipient Parkinson's. He handles with dignity and his resignation at the end is actually moving.

A Late Quartet (2012)This movie has become all the more poignant after the passing of 2nd violinist (in the quarter), Philip Seymour-Hoffman. And it's already a moving look at people wanting in their esoteric way to find meaning, great beauty, and love in their lives. Isn't that all the really matters?There are a myriad of interpersonal relationships here, including between two of the players who are married (and their daughter, who has an affair with a third player). In a way, the movie feels like a Beethoven quartet made literary, with all the counterpoint and harmony, all the relationships between parts. A very smart enterprise, but also a beautiful one.The movie might sound a bit dull from the outside, especially if you aren't a fan of classic music. I can't totally respond to that fairly because I am steeped in classic music a lot, and have some knowledge of the string quartet as a form (and a revered one). Beethoven, too, takes special important, not just for being a great composer, but because his "late" quartets are thought by some (including me) to be among the few greatest, inexplicably astonishing pieces of music ever written in any culture and era. They are that rich formally, emotionally, viscerally.So little pieces of the music sneak in as the human plot elements unfold. To call this an ensemble piece plays well on the pun. The way the players play with each other, and against each other, is oddly believable even if it seems that world, the classic music world, is a bit isolated from the rest of us on a day to day basis. The performances—again a pun—by the actors are subtle and intense.If Hoffman takes my attention now, a few months after his death, and if Catherine Keener is excellent as his wife, Christopher Walken might in the long run deserve the most attention for his role as cellist of the group. Playing against type, he is a serious, aging musician who discovers he has a degenerative disease. How does a man whose career, and love of life, depends on his hands adjust to not having them respond as needed? And what happens to the quartet, the group of four musicians molded by years together? That becomes a moving, meaty essence of the movie.By the way, it is normal for string quartet performing groups to form and stay together intact for decades—sometimes forty years without change. This means they are musically in tune with each other in an almost mystical way. It also means (as the movie explores) that their personal lives are bound and interwoven. It's a fabulously esoteric, unique part of the cultural world that you have to love.This movie is a great step to understanding and feeling why.

"A Late Quartet" looks at music as a metaphor for people's lives. The subject is a group of musicians: two violinists (Mark Ivanir and Philip Seymour Hoffman), a viola player (Catherine Keener) and a cellist (Christopher Walken). When the cellist finds that he is developing Parkinson's and probably won't be able to play for much longer, a series of things begin to happen which have a profound effect on the foursome.While the movie make substantive use of classical music - Beethoven, Hayden, Bach, etc. - there's also a sense of how the music effects the characters' egos. The first violinist really comes across as a jerk in some scenes. Not that the other characters are much better. Some scenes grow REALLY intense.It turns out to be a very interesting little movie. The collection of classical string quartets and suites to set the stage for what eventually must come to pass represents an insightful look at the role that music plays in our lives. Good support comes from cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey and "My Dinner with Andre" co-star Wallace Shawn (also of "The Princess Bride" and "Toy Story").We can only speculate on the direction that Hoffman's career would've taken had he not died.

What a pleasure to know that the film industry is still capable of putting forth rich, intensely layered, insightful character-driven movies like this one. Speaking as a musician I have to say that this is the most accurately insightful portrayal of how actual musicians work together that I have seen on film. And what a wonderful cast!! Christopher Walken and the sadly departed Phillip Seymour Hoffman live up to their usual high standards here. I had not been familiar with the work of Catherine Keener and Mark Ivanir but they acquit themselves well. Plaudits to all of them for working so hard to master the ability to look like string players. The richness of the story - the multiple personal conflicts among the players - analogized to an actual piece of music, the Beethoven op. 131, is a brilliant concept, beautifully executed. This is a totally involving and - in the end - moving story. You don't have to be a musician to be drawn into it, but it helps. It's a crime this flick never made it to the Oscars.