Common Sense Note
Parents need to know that this film focuses on a young woman's decisions concerning her upcoming wedding and sometimes strained relationship with her mother, a famous actress. It includes sexual references, a brief passionate encounter in a hallway, some language, repeated cheating by romantic partners (heterosexual and homosexual), and some verbal arguments. During a mugging that takes about 20 seconds, one character is stabbed in his side.
Families can discuss the relationship between Isabel and her mother Diana, as they discuss men, romance, cheating, and money. Families might also discuss the lack of communication between Isabel and her fiancé: how does the movie use their mutual deceits and silences as a way to critique contemporary, urban focus on careerism and self-interest?
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Cynthia Fuchs
Urbane and on occasion banal, HEIGHTS reveals its origins as a stage play in its literary dialogue and tidy metaphors. Isabel (Elizabeth Banks) takes lots of pictures of the Korean grocer across the street. While it's starting to bother her lawyer fiancé, Jonathan (James Marsden, of X-Men), she's still thinking about how she can get a "higher angle." Tomorrow, she asserts, "I'm going to the roof." She can't possibly know that going to the roof will reveal more than a different look at the grocer.
Adapted by Amy Fox from her one-act play, Chris Terrio's movie sets Isabel's day at the center of five intersecting lives. Rushing from work (she's a wedding photographer) to a pre-ceremony conference with Jonathan's earnest childhood rabbi (George Segal), to a meeting with Times magazine editors who want her for exactly the sort of journalistic essay photography she wants to do, Isabel seems bound up in inevitable disappointment. She feels further pressured by her mother, renowned actress Diana Lee (the frankly wondrous Glenn Close), currently rehearsing for a Broadway rendition of Macbeth (or, as she calls it, "the Scottish play").
The many-times-coupled Diana worries about Isabel's upcoming marriage ("We just don't click on these things, Mom, the way you talk about relationships"). Aware that her philandering husband is sleeping with her younger understudy, Diana seeks her own distraction in a young actor, Alec (Jesse Bradford), who is himself preoccupied by another, secret relationship, with a young man.
The aggressive Diana and security-seeking Isabel appear very different, but they are also similar and eventually, visibly supportive of one another. Both use art as means to control their experiences -- Diana by acting, Isabel by framing what she sees in images (one mother she photographs on the subway resents out loud that she doesn't appear to have her "own f-ing life").
Limited by her desire for what she thinks is a "life," Isabel wants to believe Jonathan's assertion that they are "real people... having a very real wedding." But the film reveals early that he keeps a secret past from her -- that he posed for a famously gay photographer. It's no coincidence that the secret lurks in the form of photographs, or that Isabel resists seeing what's in front of her. While Diana finds both release and control in performance, Isabel seeks order in her photographs. Seeking the sort of life her mother hasn't had, Isabel finds other ways to deceive herself.
Families who like this movie might also like other urbane melodramas, such as The Safety of Objects (also starring Close), Imaginary Heroes, Tadpole, or the great Bette Davis film Diana references, All About Eve (1950).
Rate It!
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Sexual ContentSome nudity, sexual referenecs, a couple of kissing scenes. |
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Violence |
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LanguageModerate. |
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Message |
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Social BehaviorRomantic dishonesty, adultery, a mother-daughter argument. |
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CommercialismSet in NYC, background logos. |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoDrinking and smoking at a late night party. |
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