Quint hires Wes Bentley to write up his LAST WORDs!
Published at: Feb. 22, 2008, 10:37 a.m. CST by quint
Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. THE LAST WORD was one of those “maybe” choices at Sundance this year. I liked the cast… Wes Bentley, Ray Romano and Winona Ryder… and I liked the premise (man makes a living writing suicide notes for depressed individuals who want their last words to be poetic), but I had already been burned by SUNSHINE CLEANERS. That was a great premise (a pair of sisters start a crime scene clean-up service) and a great cast (Alan Arkin, Amy Adams, Emily Blunt), but turned out to be a severely flawed movie.
So, I guess my expectations were low going in. The first reel didn’t impress me too much. Wes Bentley’s good at playin’ the dark, morose arty guy, of course, but the jokes kinda fell flat and the drama felt forced.
But then Ray Romano steps into the picture and it’s as if he inspired the rest of the movie to be better. And this is coming from someone who never really watched EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND. I don’t hate the guy or anything, but for whatever reason I just never really followed him much.
He makes this movie. He plays one of Wes Bentley’s clients, a suicidal composer who is ready to end his life. He gets no joy out of it anymore, apart from one particular awesome hobby of his involving scaring the shit out of babies when their parents aren’t looking.
Romano brings a dry, sarcastic humor to the film that’s desperately needed. I didn’t really like the beginning with Bentley setting up his world and the first sequences with Winona Ryder, playing the grieving sister of one of Bentley’s clients, just kinda fell flat to me. I liked the idea of Bentley essentially letting a young man kill himself only to fall for his sister. And she for him. What eventually comes of that romance is fantastic, but in the early stages it didn’t feel like it was working to me.
It might be coincidence, but that storyline turned around exactly when Ray Romano pops up, in a completely different thread of the story.
The film plays dark, but still somehow sweet. The relationship between Bentley and Ryder plays out how you’d imagine, following a certain “she doesn’t know his secret” formula, but the two have a real chemistry and they don’t really stick to that formula after a certain dramatic point and that gives it a reality that most romantic dramedies don’t have.
So, in THE LAST WORD, you have quirk, pitch black comedy, tragedy and an extremely sarcastic edge to it, thanks to Romano. It’s not a perfect movie… the second two-thirds still don’t make the opening jibe better, but they do make it work roughing out until the film finds its groove.
All in all, I really dug the movie and can’t wait for it to see release.
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com