{"id":253079,"date":"2026-01-23T06:24:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-23T06:24:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/253079\/"},"modified":"2026-01-23T06:24:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-23T06:24:07","slug":"chris-pine-and-jenny-slate-in-neorealist-love-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/253079\/","title":{"rendered":"Chris Pine and Jenny Slate in Neorealist Love Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWho says they don\u2019t make \u2019em like they used to? \u201cCarousel<\/a>,\u201d starring Chris Pine<\/a> and Jenny Slate<\/a> in a painfully languid neorealist drama of lonely-hearts romance (it\u2019s about love, but more than that it\u2019s all about the agony), is the sort of Sundance movie you might have encountered in the late \u201990s \u2014 and by that, I\u2019m not suggesting that it would have been a Sundance hit, subject to late-night bidding wars. I mean that it would have been a \u201csensitive\u201d Sundance bubble movie that got a bit of buzz and then proceeded to go nowhere in the real world. And that would have been 30 years ago!<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the present day, \u201cCarousel,\u201d with its oblique-chic drama and heavy mood shadow of Cassavetes and Bergman stylings, is a movie without a marketplace. It would get lost in the theatrical world; it will get lost on streaming. The reality is that there is no longer a viable audience for a movie like this one that ambles from scene to scene, that feels like it\u2019s been built out of \u201cactors\u2019 moments\u201d that got woven together in the editing room, that\u2019s bathed in a warm bath of art shadow that makes everything look brown, and that\u2019s overlaid with the kind of lugubrious string-section indie score that, if this is even possible, renders the characters more morose than they already are.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd yet\u2026the lead actors are very good in it. Did I believe that Chris Pine, with his waxed and coiffed Beverly Hills look, is a sad-sack divorced physician who wears a stethoscope around his neck as he runs his quaint office as a general practitioner in Cleveland, Ohio? Not exactly. But as Noah, Pine gives a performance that\u2019s rippled with anger and vulnerability, and he\u2019s such a good actor that he holds the screen. Jenny Slate, wearing a choppy bob that makes her look like she just came from the Amanda Plummer Spa, plays Rebecca, who is some sort of high-powered Washington, D.C., politico who has returned to Cleveland (after the politician she was attached to leaves office) and is now teaching high school. Noah\u2019s daughter is one of the students she\u2019s coaching on the debate team, and she and Noah become involved.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs it turns out, though, the two grew up together and were already a couple in high school. She left to pursue her career, he got married and had a daughter, and the rest is wistful tormented history. The two pick up where they left off, only now the torment rules. Because does Noah have the faith to believe?<\/p>\n

\n\tThe writer-director, Rachel Lambert (\u201cSometimes I Think About Dying\u201d), stages moments that look and feel like everyday life, and that requires talent, the kind that Rebecca Miller exhibited when she made \u201cPersonal Velocity\u201d (which premiered at Sundance in 2002). But if you\u2019re going to work on that high wire of quotidian experience, you also need to give the audience something to hold onto. \u201cCarousel\u201d feels \u201cauthentic,\u201d but it\u2019s also rudderless. And the storytelling, what little there is of it, has an elliptical quality that sometimes leaves you going, \u201cWait, can you explain that a little more?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFor a while, the drama centers on how Noah\u2019s teenage daughter, Maya (Abby Ryder Fortson), is holding onto a hidden rage at her dad due to her parents\u2019 divorce. She lashes out, at one point cutting her finger in a door (one of those accidents-that\u2019s-really-not), and Rebecca, having taken the girl under her wing, warns Noah that it\u2019s only going to get worse. Then Rebecca comes up with a plan to send Maya to a six-week program at Stanford, and as soon as the girl arrives there\u2026she\u2019s fine.<\/p>\n

\n\tNoah, meanwhile, dropped Maya off at the airport, and in the movie\u2019s strangest sequence he then goes on a cinnamon-roll-and-alcohol bender right there in the terminal, waking up in the Nashville airport. I appreciated the audacity of this sequence, but not so much the way that it wears its audacity on its sleeve. That said, at one point Noah and Rebecca have an extended argument in the kitchen, and it\u2019s a beautifully acted scene, staged with a stinging awareness of how a divorced father like Noah can assert his authority in a way that\u2019s at once justified and utterly desperate. Pine plays this with exquisite understanding, and Slate, in a role shorn of comedy, makes you feel the squirmy misery of being caught in a domestic dispute where there\u2019s no winning position.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tI should add that the film is also about the primal ambivalence one can have toward renovating and selling the family home. In short, \u201cCarousel\u201d is a flawed drama that can be disjointed, but by the end the movie feels worth it: mannered at times, touchingly real at others. What does the title mean? I have no idea. (Whatever it means, it\u2019s too abstract.) And since the movie is premiering at Sundance, it\u2019s probably destined to be praised in a way that overshadows its quality of hermetic gloom. Only now, the question that does need to be looked at squarely is: Who, exactly, is going to see this?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Who says they don\u2019t make \u2019em like they used to? \u201cCarousel,\u201d starring Chris Pine and Jenny Slate in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":253080,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[10217,134649,146,85,46,100977,397],"class_list":["post-253079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-carousel","tag-chris-pine","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-jenny-slate","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253079\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/253080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}