THE WASHINGTON POST.
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2019EZ
Movies
Before You Know It
A film that’s a little weird, a little wise and just shy of wonderful
BY MICHAEL O’SULLIVAN
The main story line of “Before
You Know It” concerns two adult
sisters: Rachel (Hannah Pearl
Utt), a mousy 30-something who
buries herself in her work as the
stage manager of a tiny Green-
wich Village theater run by her
actor/playwright father (Mandy
Patinkin); and Jackie (Jen Tull-
ock), an actress and single moth-
er to the tomboyish 12-year-old
Dodge (the wonderful Oona
Yaffe). When Dad dies suddenly,
Rachel and Jackie are shocked to
discover that there’s another
name on the deed to the theater,
in addition to his: It’s their moth-
er (Judith Light), a woman who
they thought was dead, but who
turns out to be a successful soap
opera actress.
The inevitable awkward meet-
ing and the subsequent comic
thawing of tensions — why exact-
ly did she leave them? — is the
engine that drives this quirky
little film, but it’s mainly a vehicle
to showcase the laid-back gifts of
Utt, who directed the film, and
Tullock, who shares a writing
credit with her. (The two are best
known as co-creators of the Web
series “Disengaged,” in which
they play a lesbian couple consid-
ering marriage.) Although most
of the film takes place in that
mother-daughter reunion lane,its far more interesting bits take
place along the edges and out-
skirts of the central narrative.
Those fringes include Alec
Baldwin as Dodge’s unhelpful
therapist, a married man who
also happens to be having an
affair with Jackie, and Mike Col-ter (“Luke Cage”) as the theater’s
new accountant, a single father
whose daughter quickly becomes
Dodge’s BFF (Arica Himmel). The
two girls plot how they can fix up
their parents with each other and
become sisters.
It’s hard to say what exactly“Before You Know It” wants to be
about, thematically. Forgiveness?
Letting go? Reconnecting with a
long-lost someone (and also with
yourself )? Those never wholly an-
swered questions — coupled with
the imbalance between its so-so
ostensible main plot and its farmore interesting subplots —
makes it an odd thing. Are these
traits flaws or features? That de-
pends, to a large degree, on
whether you’re a glass-half-full or
glass-half-empty person.
As for me, I loved the relaxed,
naturalistic rapport between Ra-
chel, Jackie and Dodge, who live
above the theater and whose rela-
tionships, while prickly at times,
feel loving and — more important
— recognizable.
“Before You Know It” isn’t a
deep movie, or a hilarious one,
and Utt and Tullock probably
don’t expect it to be. But it is, in its
undemanding, almost effortless
way, warm and wise and watch-
able enough to be just this side of
wonderful.
[email protected]1091 MEDIAUnrated. At Landmark’s E Street
Cinema. Contains coarse language
and some mature thematic
elements. 98 minutes.Vita & Virginia
The story of a legendary affair that leaves much to be desired
BY MICHAEL O’SULLIVAN
The English actress and writer
Eileen Atkins debuted a stage
version of “Vita & Virginia” — a
play about the love affair between
writers Vita Sackville-West and
Virginia Woolf, based on 20 years
of their written correspondence
— in 1994. In a review of the play,
which starred Vanessa Redgrave
as Vita and Atkins as Virginia, the
New York Times found fault with
the production’s static staging,
which interspersed infrequent
face-to-face encounters between
the women with a simple recita-
tion of text. “A couple of lecterns
would have done the job just as
well,” the Times snarked. (A 2008
revival dispensed with the pre-
tense of human interaction en-
tirely, featuring actresses reading
from scripts set on side-by-side
music stands.)
A new film version of the play,
directed Chanya Button from ascript co-written with Atkins,
opens up the story a lot, setting
scenes in the two characters’
homes and elsewhere, and in-cluding conversations with the
women’s husbands and various
members of the bohemian
Bloomsbury Group: paintersDuncan Grant and Vanessa Bell
(Virginia’s sister), among others.
But the title characters, who kin-
dled a brief romance and carried
on a much longer friendship, still
feel like a couple of specimens
preserved in glass jars. They can
see each other, but they hardly
seem to touch, even when they’re
in the same room — or bed —
together. True to its epistolary
roots, the film still features many
interludes of the actresses (Gem-
ma Arterton as the racy Vita and
Elizabeth Debicki as the more
reserved and depressive Virginia)
quoting from the writers’ letters
as they stare straight ahead into
the camera.
It hardly makes for scintillat-
ing cinema, even given the whiff
of scandalousness with which
Button and Atkins lay out the
stages of Vita and Virginia’s rela-
tionship: flirtation, seduction,
consummation, then a kind of
sisterly companionship. Only Isa-bella Rossellini, playing Vita’s
mother — so shocked by her
daughter’s previous fling with the
socialite Violet Trefusis — manag-
es to convey anything like drama.
Even a subplot addressing Vir-
ginia’s psychological break-
downs, probably because of bipo-
lar disorder, plays out with an air
of clinical detachment, and does
little to engage the audience or
shed light on who these women
really were. An on-screen title
card at the end of the film refers to
Woolf ’s 1941 death, strangely,
without mentioning that it was
suicide.
“Vita & Virginia” may be about
two fascinating characters, but
it’s also a case of words, paradoxi-
cally, obscuring the real people
who wrote them.
[email protected]IFC FILMSElizabeth Debicki, left, stars as Virginia Woolf opposite Gemma
Arterton’s Vita Sackville-West in this snooze of a drama.Unrated. At Landmark’s E Street
Cinema. Contains a sex scene. 110
minutes.From left, Hannah Pearl
Utt, Judith Light and Jen
Tullock star in a film about
the untangling of family
secrets after the death of a
patriarch. Utt directs
“Before,” which centers on
an awkward mother-
daughter reunion, and
Tullock shares a writing
credit with her.