Language: English
Anna Karenina opens with a statement as often countered as it is cited, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In Tolstoy’s generalisation is a paradox. To be happy and to be alike are contradictory notions. There is comfort in conformity, but conformity in comfort leads to unhappiness. Because we are conditioned to want more than — and by extension be unlike — everyone else. It’s why Rory O’Hara (Jude Law), in Sean Durkin’s second feature The Nest, decides to uproot his family from their American idyll to seek the fantasy of a better life in the UK.
Happy families also don’t make for great storytelling. Unhappy families on the other hand are catnip. There’s drama in dysfunction. And the O’Haras are as dysfunctional as they come. They don’t start off that way though. A chic home in suburban New York, complete with white picket fences and a swimming pool in the backyard — they were living the good life for sure. Wife Allison (Carrie Coon) is happy riding horses and working as an instructor. Children Sam (Oona Roche) and Ben (Charlie Shotwell) are about as happy as a teen and pre-teen can be. Rory is a trader always chasing the next big deal. His next will upend domestic bliss and all its familiar comforts as he drags the family across the Atlantic.
Waiting for them on the other side is a centuries-old mansion outside London. Too much house for a family of four, the purchase is a symbol of Rory’s inflated ego. The mansion, a mere shadow of its former glory, repels all warmth and light. With the dark hallways, the creaking floorboards and stained-glass windows, it could very well have been the setting of a Gothic horror. It’s not ghosts that haunt the O’Haras though. It’s lies and deception.
Mátyás Erdély’s camera snoops on the family, initially maintaining a cautious distance but closes in as they break apart. Isolated from each other, the atmosphere becomes suffocating in the old mansion, a crumbling facade devouring them from the inside out. A string-driven throughline from Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry turns the mood damn near oppressive.
Things unravel, not with any dramatic acceleration, but with a lingering inevitability. While Rory is off pursuing his grand ambitions, Allison tries to hold the family together even as everyone withdraws into their own worlds. Snapshots reveal the family’s maladjustments to relocation: Ben begins bed-wetting after being bullied in his new private school, Sam turns to drugs to relieve her boredom, and Allison battles her loneliness trapped in a big empty house. Even Allison’s horse Richmond struggles to adjust.
Durkin employs Richmond as a symbol of Rory and Allison’s disintegrating marriage. For Rory, the horse presents little more than ornamental value, something that elevates his status like a fancy car. For Allison, it is a “living, breathing, animal” whom she is trying to save despite unfavourable circumstances. Much like their marriage. Only, she may simply be beating a dead horse.
Veering away from the nostalgia that has come to romanticise the ‘80s, Durkin washes away the colour and warmth with cold blues and greys. The mid-80s forced change on everyone who lived through the period. Ronald Reagan was in power in the US. Margaret Thatcher in the UK. Markets were being deregulated. The ambitious went wherever there was opportunity, hoping to gallop through life on the back of a quick buck. Rory, who comes from a working-class background, is particularly motivated to climb the social ladder. He in fact uses his upbringing to justify why the world owes him more (“I had a shitty childhood, and I deserve this, and I deserve a lot more.”) Moreover, he’s British. So, his idea of success differs from those trying to realise the American Dream. At the top end of the ladder isn’t the suburban middle-class, but aristocracy.
This cultural difference plays a role in Rory and Allison’s marriage crumbling. For Allison knows Rory’s routine all too well. To be married is to live with a witness who has seen it all. When Rory tries to convince her on moving to England, she tells him, “Stop trying to sell me on it,” because she has heard his sales pitch before and seen the whole production. Weeks into their move, when she begins to hide her own money in a box, she is hiding it because she knows Rory will eventually come looking for it. And he does. What makes their domestic crisis ripe for vivisection is Allison’s awareness of Rory’s sincerity from his posturing.
The tension reaches tipping point at a dinner when Rory tries to wow a client with expensive bottles of wine and tickets to see Anthony Hopkins in a play. Allison snort-laughs, calls out his delusion and leaves. She’s tired of playing the supportive wife. Gender roles be damned. So, she goes to a nightclub, knocks back a couple of vodka tonics and hits the dance floor on her own. She has finally stood her ground.
Law offers a fractured study of a man desperately trying to keep up the facade that everything is going to work out. When Rory is defeated in yet another failed enterprise, Law reveals a pitiable man who is tired of pretending. But this is really Coon's movie. In a quietly calibrated performance, she depicts Allison's unravelling with minor but striking changes in demeanour and cadence, conveying so much with a flinty gaze. Durkin gives Coon a rich character study she can truly make her own, just as he did with Elisabeth Olsen in Martha Marcy May Marlene.
Bear in mind though Durkin doesn’t judge Rory as much as fault the system which pushes us to never be happy with what we have, and always aspire for more. He faults a culture that promotes extravagant spending as a pretence of success, luring people into debt and destroying families. When we see the O’Haras seated at the table in the final scene, there is resentment over what’s transpired and anxiety over what the future holds. But they’re all unhappy together in that moment. Hope co-exists with some understandable doubts over whether they can get through this latest setback together. In that way, the counter-quote Nabokov suggested in Ada holds true too: “all unhappy families are more or less alike.”
The Nest will be available to buy and rent on BookMyShow Stream from 10 September.
Rating: 4/5
from Firstpost Bollywood Latest News https://ift.tt/3Eee9lE
via IFTTT
