After two great films (Hi My Name is Ryan, The Burning Plain) to start my Phoenix Film Festival experience I had high hopes for this movie about a modern day New York executive tired of the corporate world of Madison Avenue advertising. In the intro' before the movie started we were told that the writer/director, Anthony Tarsitano is in the theater and sitting on the back row a few seats away from me! Well this goes down as the first time I have sat in the same row as the director of the movie I was watching ... good job it wasn't a comedy, talk about pressure to laugh if it had been! The lead character of Dante is played by Dennis Boutsokaris who is a watchable enough actor and certainly comes well recommended having just played Paul Wolfowitz in Oliver Stone's W. He is supported by Sideway's Jessica Hecht playing a Buddhist life coach trying to help Dante attach meaning to his mid-life crisis and Robert Clohessy playing his wise cracking buddy.
The film uses flashbacks to tell the story of Dantes romance with his late wife Alba and how they met when he was a young idealistic art student. These are intertwined with his world weary life of today which changes radically when he decides to up and leave his job and look for more meaning in life following the death of his wife to a random mugging. All of which sounds like a decent enough premise for a reflective film questioning our career driven lives at the expense of a more meaningful existence but unfortunately Tarsitano has written and directed a film so stilted and detached that empathising for Dante is virtually impossible.
The premise may be well meaning and even interesting on paper but the writing has nothing to keep the audience's attention with lines falling flat throughout what was a very long 87 minutes. It's hard to pinpoint anything particularly wrong with Boutsokaris's or Hecht's performances but as the over the top New Yorker, Clohessy's performance was a caricature that jarred in every scene. The narrative trudges along as if through mud never giving the characters a chance to interest us and frankly when the end came it was an act of mercy as I don't think I have sighed that much through a film in a very long time.
Turgid is how I would describe Calling it Quits because it is a film that frustrated and frankly bored me.
Rating: *
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