{"id":842395,"date":"2026-09-10T01:44:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-10T01:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/842395\/"},"modified":"2026-09-10T01:44:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T01:44:09","slug":"place-to-be-review-ellen-burstyn-carries-a-corny-road-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/842395\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Place to Be’ Review: Ellen Burstyn Carries a Corny Road Movie"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tI have to be honest: As much as I love Ellen Burstyn<\/a> \u2014 and who doesn\u2019t love Ellen Burstyn? \u2014 the idea of watching a \u201clighthearted road movie\u201d starring the 93-year-old Oscar winner, Taiki Waititi, Pamela Anderson<\/a> and a pigeon filled me with a certain level of dread. I was thus rather pleasantly surprised, though definitely not convinced, by Place to Be, a sentimental if somewhat endearing friendship dramedy that could perhaps be described as Trains, Planes and Automobiles meets Harold and Maude, or something like that.<\/p>\n

\n\tDirected by Korn\u00e9l Mundrucz\u00f3, who made several acclaimed features in his native Hungary before branching out into English-language fare like Pieces of a Woman<\/a> and At the Sea<\/a>, this offbeat gro-mance (if that\u2019s what you call a buddy movie between a grandma and middle-aged bro) is at best an homage to the talents of the great Burstyn, who delivers a memorable performance despite some of the maudlin turns the story takes. After bowing out of competition in Venice, the film will probably find a place to be on streaming.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tPlace to Be\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n

\tA corny concept elevated by a major actress.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue: Venice Film Festival (Out of Competition)
Cast: Ellen Burstyn, Taika Waititi, Pamela Anderson, David Wenham, Lena Waithe, Murray Bartlett
Director: Korn\u00e9l Mundrucz\u00f3
Screenwriter: Kata Weber
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1 hour 44 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s encouraging to see the nonagenarian actress still going strong more than half a century after winning the Academy Award for her role as a struggling single mom in Scorsese\u2019s Alice Doesn\u2019t Live Here Anymore. Not only was she present on the Lido<\/a> for the premiere of Mundrucz\u00f3\u2019s movie, but Burstyn also starred as Marilyn Monroie in Maggie Gyllenhaal\u2019s short film Flesh Impact, gave a masterclass and received a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe actress is the main reason to sit through Place to Be, in which she portrays a lonely, occasionally sharp-tongued widow named Brooke who finds a racing pigeon flying around her living room and decides to travel all the way from Chicago to New York to return the bird to its rightful owner. The far-fetched scenario, written by Mundrucz\u00f3\u2019s wife and regular collaborator Kata Weber, requires a certain leap of faith \u2014 or rather the skills of someone like Burstyn to make it not seem completely ridiculous.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile she\u2019s waiting to take the train, Brooke runs into Nelson (Waititi), a divorced and down-on-his-luck real estate agent who desperately needs to sell a luxury apartment in Tribeca. The two start off more as frenemies than friends, but through a combination of happenstance and necessity, they wind up spending more and more time together, first on their way to Manhattan and then once they get there and Brooke can\u2019t find a place to stay.<\/p>\n

\n\tBurstyn and Waititi showcase some decent chemistry despite the latter\u2019s slightly overcooked attempts at comedy, dishing out a few good lines while their characters mostly hang out and shoot the breeze. One memorable scene has Burstyn describing how turned off she was by the free love movement of the 1960s, in a seemingly improvised monologue that reveals she can still be both funny and genuine.<\/p>\n

\n\tAll of this happens while their characters are schlepping their lost bird around town, first visiting a rooftop coop in Bushwick that\u2019s run by Lena Waithe, then heading out to Jersey to watch pigeons fly home to the finish line in a race involving big sums of money. Mundrucz\u00f3 already revealed his talent for shooting epic animal scenes in his 2014 Cannes prizewinner White God<\/a>, and here he takes several, well, flights-of-fancy with his cast of birds, using a tad too much CGI to give those sequences a magical realist edge.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s a faint suggestion early on that the pigeon represents Brooke\u2019s deceased husband, who was a famous painter and not necessarily the best father to her kids, Ron (David Wenham) and Molly (Pamela Anderson, nearly unrecognizable in a late-period Mia Farrow disguise). But the bird, which gets named Intruder, functions more as a MacGuffin to keep the plot moving and push Brooke and Nelson closer together.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat closeness gets a bit cringey in the third act \u2014 set on the Jersey Shore but shot in Australia \u2014 when it seems like things might teeter into a full-fledged romance between Brooke and Nelson that nobody wants to witness. But Place to Be is ultimately the story of a three-pronged friendship (the third prong being the pigeon) involving a trio of lost souls looking for affection and finding it in unsual ways.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf it weren\u2019t for its exceptional lead, such a concept would probably drown in its own schmaltz. Not only does Burstyn make Brooke\u2019s plight feel moving in places, but she brings a level of Actors Studio realism to a part for which her age and decades of experience play to her advantage. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I have to be honest: As much as I love Ellen Burstyn \u2014 and who doesn\u2019t love Ellen…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":842396,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[242104,88,206,35217,16322,332222,24350,353150],"class_list":["post-842395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ellen-burstyn","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-pamela-anderson","tag-taika-waititi","tag-venice-2026","tag-venice-film-festival","tag-venice-film-festival-2026"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=842395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842395\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/842396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=842395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=842395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=842395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}