Culture

Rating: B+

This movie is like combining American Beauty with Misery, and the plot from The Great Gatsby. With Robin Williams, too, as the same creep-next-door from One Hour Photo.

Nikki (Annette Bening) is traumatically widowed when her husband of 30 happy years drowns beside her, but years later she meets his exact double, Tom (Ed Harris). She is unable to stop herself from pursuing him for all the wrong reasons, and becomes a pro-stalker, finding out that he is a painting tutor and enrolling in private tuition with him. Eventually, a relationship develops, and Nikki thinks that her years of repressing the happy memories of her husband are over, and they can be together again.

The film starts with a sad story, but quickly gets very, very creepy. Like Jay Gatsby, Nikki finds herself trying to recreate the glorious past, by dressing Tom in the same clothes as her late husband and taking him to the same places. Our sorrow and sympathy for her quickly turns to wonder and frustration at her intransigence. When her shameful ploy is exposed, the question is, will Nikki willingly throw away her family, friends, sanity, self-respect, and ultimately, her life, in order to continue this grief-fuelled fantastical pursuit of her dead love, or will she move on, and dive back into the water again?

The film is beautifully composed, with hints of people as they are imagined and held by others tucked into the corners via photographs, artworks, and flashbacks. Annette Bening, as with Carolyn in American Beauty (1999), does an incredible job of acting like somebody totally over the edge and yet still projecting an image of sanity, which is not easy to do. With all the photographs, chance-meetings, and confusing-the-pronouns blunders threatening to expose her mad charade at any moment, the audience is surprisingly on-edge, and anticipating the inevitable collapse of it all. And, of course, Tom might have a few bombshells of his own to drop on Nikki. Worth watching, worth remembering.