A boy's best friend

Love after Love

Crit

Andie MacDowell plays the matriarch of a family in a narrative that takes chronological jumps in a way that put me in mind of Hannah and Her Sisters, which is not a bad thing. Here we have brothers instead of sisters, and here the brother who starts out as "the good one" (Chris Dowd) churns through wives and affairs all the while it's clear to the viewer that he'll never be in love with anyone as he's in love with his mother. Not in a creepy way, just in a possessive, clingy way. OK, yeah, that's pretty creepy.

Also, the sloppy-drunk black-sheep brother (James Adomian), whose talent, he says, is for writing short things that no one will ever want to read, gets to deliver the unexpected (and very funny) comic monologue that serves as the centerpiece of the film.

Oh, and about MacDowell: (1) either I've never given her enough credit as an actor, or she has suddenly blossomed, but (2) she really needs to start at least vaguely resembling the 60 she turned today; took me awhile to recognize in the opening scene that her character and Dowd's were mother-son, not a couple. (Though given what I've said above, maybe that was just smart filmmaking.)