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copyright ©1999-2003
DigsMagazine.com.
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Plot synopsis
Lovely
and Amazing is the story of single mom Jane Marks, her two grown-up
daughters, Michelle and Elizabeth, and her eight-year old adopted
daughter, Annie. All four live in sunny LA, and share a tendency to
obsess over their own self-perceived flaws.
Jane, for instance, has recently become worried about looking her
age, and has made the decision to undergo liposuction in an effort to
feel a bit better about herself. Oldest daughter Michelle, meanwhile,
finds herself growing angrier and more bitter by the day, as she suffers
through an unhappy marriage, and tries to make a living selling
elaborately-constructed miniature chairs to local gift shops, not
surprisingly without much success. She hates the snotty saleswomen who
won’t even look at her work, she hates her philandering husband, she
pretty much hates the entire world – but really, what it comes down
to, is that she sort of hates herself, and has a sneaking suspicion that
those high school days back when she was homecoming queen may have been
the peak of her life. Elizabeth’s self-loathing is much more on the
surface: a struggling actress on the verge of minor success, she can’t
help but let the constant judging that goes on in the acting world eat
away at her self-esteem. She’s uncomfortable in her body, and
constantly seeks reassurance from her writer boyfriend who, by this
point, has long since grown tired of coddling her neuroses. Annie,
meanwhile, not only feels bad about herself because she’s overweight,
but because as the lone black face in her family, her dark skin and
kinky hair don’t seem beautiful to her.
Review
Nicole
Holofcener’s first film, Walking
and Talking, is one of my favorite security blanket movies ever
– there’s nothing revolutionary about it (it’s in many respects a
pretty typical indie talkfest about life and love in New York), but
there’s something about the characters that just rings so true for me.
They’re funny, and flawed, and lovably real, and watching Walking
and Talking is like spending time with good girlfriends. So it was
with pretty high anticipations that I went into Lovely
and Amazing – expecting, I suppose, a sort of Walking and Talking 2: The LA version, something charming and light
and ultimately kind of feel-good. But despite the nearly interchangeable
titles, the two movies couldn’t be more different in terms of tone.
Beneath the wit and humor, Lovely
and Amazing is kind of a sad movie, that deals with something dark
and kind of ugly about women and their insecurities: specifically, the
way these insecurities perpetuate the cycle of low self-esteem in other
females. None of the women/girls in Lovely and Amazing are
remotely close to being happy with who they are – either outside or
inside – and it’s often pretty painful to watch each of these
characters either humiliate themselves or those who love them simply
because they’re feeling so wretched about how they look, or what they’re
doing with their lives. You can’t decide whether you want to hug them
or smack them: it’s awful to watch perfectly lovely women beating
themselves up because they don’t live up to some ridiculous societal
ideal of the perfect female, but on the other hand, you increasingly
begin to get the feeling that these characters bring their (ultimately
pretty shallow, in the grand scheme of things) problems onto themselves.
The acting and casting are perfect, the characterizations 100%
realistic, but the characters themselves – with the exception of
little Annie – aren’t terribly easy to like. And maybe that’s kind
of the point. What’s so quietly miraculous about Holofcener’s second
movie is that it’s a chick flick that absolutely refuses to
romanticize the female experience into something fluffy and cuddly and
cute. Instead it’s funny and serious, charming and hateful, beautiful
and ugly and sometimes a little wistful -- like real women, really, when
you think about it.
—reviewed
by Yee-Fan Sun
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