Film: Last Weekend
Directed by: Tom Dolby, Tom Williams
Starring: Patricia Clarkson, Jayma Mays

Last Weekend opened the 16^th annual Provincetown Film Festival to a packed house of bright-eyed viewers hoping to see Patricia Clarkson (The Green Mile, Shutter Island) steal the show as an extremely wealthy patriarch coping with her children and their friends on the last weekend of summer. Fortunately, Clarkson steals the show as Celia, a mother tasked with making a weekend for many a great one despite usual generic family dysfunction. On the other hand, though, her masterfully acted performance is slogged down by an anti-climactic plot and equally one-dimensional characters that all suffer from the same thing: being wealthy.

Many films have explored the issue of battling egos within families that always end up in some sort of secret-revealing family-wide fight in which at least one person gets hurt (emotionally and/or physically). Weirdly enough, all of the characters let their pride and infidelities get in the way of enjoying a weekend but it all never comes to a head. This would seem to be a positive thing about the film, how it detracts from the norm. On the contrary though, if you are not going to let these characters release their aggression on each other and learn from their mistakes in the process then how are we supposed to feel for them? That is where the film’s biggest fault is, in its characters.

Another issue the film has that brings back up the anti-climactic nature of the film is the runtime. The film may sport a lean 97-minute length but even that feels too long for a film to pander on good people making bad decisions whilst ruminating on the struggle of being rich. You know, like making your well-off parents proud but without riding their expensive coattails. The diversity of characters including the oft-represented gay son with a new boyfriend, the famous movie star friend, and the other son struggling with a debilitating secret all come together and clash over morals of the most menial of things/situations. Unfortunately, there is no feeling of redemption at the end of the film. None of the characters really changed all that much at the end and that definitely hurt the believability of the events that occurred.

Joseph Cross (of Lincoln and Running With Scissors fame) plays Roger, one of Celia’s sons, who is recently stricken with unemployment and is trying to hide it from his parents. Naturally, trying to make people proud of him fuels all his character’s motivations. The revealing of his unemployment to his parents can be seen from a mile away and how they react is even more predictable in that we already believe these people are good people and can forgive/forget. Most of the characters follow this same path of predictability, as every single one of them is just another variation on tropes that have been done before.

Luckily, the humor injected into these situations provides comic relief for the film’s slowest and most dramatically downtrodden moments. Clarkson being the main proprietor of this humor as a character that drinks wine as much as she lets loose socially uncomfortable comments. Tom Dolby and Tom Williams aside from breathtakingly beautiful shots of Lake Tahoe direct the film as if the viewer is a fly on the wall. There is nothing fancy to how the film is presented. It seems as if these first time directors took a more minimalistic approach by just putting a camera in a room and letting it roll.

Overall, Last Weekend was a lackluster choice to open up the festival but the addition of having the directors along with Cross and Clarkson after to conduct a Q&A with the audience. Clarkson is a magnificent actress who is usually in the background of films playing some sort of mother or wife archetype but she shows in this film that she can handle being front and center. Here’s to hoping Clarkson gets more demanding roles like this one in the future.

GRADE: C

Written by: Sam Cohen — (Follow him on Twitter)

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Sam Cohen

Sam Cohen is that guy you can't have a conversation with without bringing up Michael Mann. He is also incapable of separating himself from his teenage angst (looking at you, Yellowcard). Read on as he tries to formulate words about movies!

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