"Lovely & Amazing"

Catherine Keener, Emily Mortimer and Brenda Blethyn shine in a delicate, loose-limbed and tremendously alive indie about women, family, self-image and survival.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Jun 28, 2002 | For all the movies being made today, it's almost shocking how few of them populate the gulf between flashy, huge-budget Hollywood pictures and small, well-intentioned but inept indies, the latter often shot on digital video that manages to add a dishwater haze to even the loveliest of images. A small, well-made movie is always a wonderful thing, which is probably why sympathetic filmgoers make excuses for all those smaller movies that are not so well-made: "The big studios won't give young directors jobs to help them learn their craft -- no wonder they don't know what they're doing." Or, "This may not look good, but it's better than the heartless professionalism of most big Hollywood films." Or, "The director just didn't have any money to work with."

The problem is that most of those arguments boil down to how much money a filmmaker had or didn't have, rather than what he or she has upstairs. Good characters, and a good story, are cheap. And in that respect, Nicole Holofcener's second picture, "Lovely & Amazing" (her first was the 1997 "Walking & Talking"), is a small movie that doesn't feel small. It's mostly because Holofcener, who also wrote the script, clearly made the effort not just to develop her characters but also to listen to them and let them tell her where the story should go. It's a movie made with care and attention to emotional detail, and these days that can make a film seem priceless.

Beyond that, there's a light, casual feel to "Lovely & Amazing" that's invaluable in this weird era of moviemaking, a time when we're inundated with slick mainstream products but also get our share of ploddingly sincere but carelessly made indies. "Lovely & Amazing" is about the way people in families relate to one another, about the way women feel about their looks not just as they age but at any age, about racial differences and presuppositions that no one ever wants to talk about. Yet the picture's themes never ring off the screen with that ungodly feedback-like sound. Instead, they swing back at you after the movie's over, resounding with a soft ping.

Michelle Marks (Catherine Keener) is a jobless artist: She makes labor-intensive, hand-printed wrapping paper and tiny, elfin chairs that she tries, halfheartedly and unsuccessfully, to sell to local shops. Michelle, who's nearing 40, is vaguely dissatisfied with her marriage, although she loves her young daughter very much. And while she generally means well, she's continually guilty of saying the wrong thing or at least the thoughtless thing. Self-absorbed, oversensitive and smolderingly insecure, she alienates people even as she's trying to draw them closer: She announces more than once, to people who couldn't care less, how natural childbirth was the greatest thing she ever did, unaware that she's coming off as the mommy equivalent of a businessguy who brags about his expensive car.

Michelle's younger sister, Elizabeth (Emily Mortimer), is an actress who doesn't get many roles and who also has a predilection for stray dogs, taking in every one she finds. Fragile but not unhealthy-looking, Elizabeth is reminded every day that she's in a business that requires her body to be "perfect." It doesn't help that she has a boyfriend (James LeGros, in a small, nasty, nicely sculpted role) who keeps reminding her of everything that's wrong with her, particularly her flabby upper arms (which, naturally, are barely jiggly at all).

Both Michelle and Elizabeth are at first distracted and then alarmed when their mother, Jane (Brenda Blethyn), goes into the hospital for a supposedly simple liposuction procedure that goes awry. Chiefly, they have to make room in their routines for the care of their 8-year-old sister Annie (Raven Goodwin, in a wonderful, blessedly uncute performance), whom Jane adopted.

Annie is African-American; she is also vaguely pudgy. She walks and talks with more self-assurance than either of her full-grown sisters (or, for that matter, her mother), although it's clear that she's beginning to have her own doubts about who she is and how she's perceived by the people around her. It doesn't help that Lorraine, a volunteer from the Big Sisters program (played with the perfect amount of self-righteous crispness by Aunjanue Ellis, who was recently seen in "Undercover Brother"), announces to her, in no uncertain terms, that she has it tougher than anyone else in her family simply because she is black.

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