July 17, 1996

WALKING AND TALKING is the debut film from writer/director Nicole Holofcener (the warden in MI VIDA LOCA). Like the last movie I reviewed, DON’T LOOK BACK, it opens with its protagonists as little kid best friends, but this is a much more female perspective of the world, so instead of establishing their life long friendship with playing swords and becoming blood brothers the two girls are sneaking a peek at The Joy of Sex, giggling and calling it disgusting. Unspecified years later they’re still best friends, but at different places in their other relationships, which will create a strain.

Amelia (Catherine Keener, SURVIVAL QUEST) is the most outwardly messy of the pair. A while back she broke up with Andrew (Liev Schreiber right before SCREAM; this was released by Miramax, and they were really pushing him as their new product at the time). They’re still friends and co-workers, they even grocery shop together, but I don’t know, the smile she gives after telling her therapist (Joseph Siravo, CARLITO’S WAY) she’s totally over him made me think she’s really not. Either way, things fall apart when she finds out Laura (Anne Heche, MILK MONEY) got engaged to Frank (Todd Field, EYE OF THE EAGLE 2: INSIDE THE ENEMY). I mean they seem to have been together forever, they already live together, they’re all close and it’s great. But making it official like that makes Amelia panic. And right after she decided to quit therapy.

One of her responses is to lower her threshold for dating, specifically by finally saying yes to Bill (Kevin Corrigan, ONE GOOD COP), the clerk at the indie video store who always asks her out. She says he’s ugly, but ends up having sex with him and being into him. I’ve read that Holofcener worked at a video store after film school, but I’m sorry to report that the movie does not seem to consider Bill (a Fangoria subscriber) to be a catch. He’s nice but not the most advanced in social skills and doesn’t seem to recognize that she’s too much of a normie for the exploitation shit he’s pushing on her. In his defense, when he waxes poetic about BASKET CASE props at what she calls “the weirdo convention” he might be intentionally playing down his level of nerd-dom by not specifying the sequel number or going into how low budget the first one was or anything like that.

Laura doesn’t have a therapist, she is one, but she’s not as put together as Amelia assumes. She does seem to love Frank and they “match each other’s freak” as they say now, because he proposes to her while she’s watching him pee? And puts the ring in her diaphragm case. And doesn’t wash his hands. She seems okay with all that and doesn’t say otherwise but starts to worry about her sexual attraction to other men, including one of her patients. Is that bad, she wonders? And suddenly she’s fighting with Frank over stupid shit. She’s as scared as Amelia.

Keener was actually about 10 years older than Heche, but it seems like maybe they’re both supposed to be in their twenties? It doesn’t matter. It works.

It’s far from a high concept movie, or a tight narrative. Just a musing on friendship, sex and love and the ways people prioritize one over the others, or let them get in the way of each other. So it mostly comes down to these actors being good and charismatic, feeling relatable, giving us a few laughs. It’s a low key movie, but a pretty good one. My wife wondered if Amelia was “supposed to be awful,” but what I like about this is that I find both of the friends likable while also fucked up in certain ways. Like any of us. I guess as I get older I see something very humane about movies loving characters despite all their mistakes and issues. I feel seen as a person to see flawed characters even though they’re not usually the same flaws I have.

Holofcener’s mom was a set decorator and her stepfather Charles H. Joffe produced Woody Allen’s movies for 40 years, so she ended up being an extra, a p.a. and an apprentice editor on some of them. But she didn’t want to be a director until she saw Jim Jarmusch’s STRANGER THAN PARADISE. This seems more influenced by the other guy, what with these New Yorkers and their relationships and everything, but centering on emotional women instead of intellectual men makes a huge difference. To me it’s more appealing.

Everybody’s good in this, but it’s especially a good showcase for Keener. She was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead, but I guess we can’t call this her breakthrough, because she’d already been nominated for JOHNNY SUEDE. Still, this was a well reviewed movie that helped all of the leads get more work and quickly become well known, and it started a long collaboration for Keener and Holofcener.

Holofcener didn’t get another movie made for five years (LOVELY AND AMAZING, also starring Keener), but in the gap had plenty of work directing Sex and the City and Six Feet Under and stuff. In the decades since she’s had six more features as a writer/director and also has writing credits on THE LAST DUEL and CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME?, which she got an Oscar nomination for (and won WGA and Independent Spirit awards). So she’s still going strong.

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Slam Evil Summer connections: Field was a storm chaser in TWISTER, Corrigan had a bit part in THE PALLBEARER, as one of the other pallbearers.

‘90s shit: Of course having an important plot point about overhearing an answering machine message could only happen in a certain window of time. And it’s nice now to see video stores documented in movies. This is a small one. I noticed multiple copies of DUMB AND DUMBER, an adult section that’s not cordoned off, and a whole row of Something Weird videos.