Love After Love (2018)

Absolutely brilliant

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

I was hoping to be able to lose myself in this film but alas all I wanted to do was leave the theater. Hung it but it never got better. All of the characters were so flawed that it just wasn't believable!

Love After Love should continue the prepositional phrase forever because the major players in this finely wrought drama are forever looking for love or grieving about it. Matriarch Suzanne (Andie MacDowell) loses her husband and wanders around her two sons almost in a fog of grief but maybe more in puzzlement about how they are working out their fates without her influence.They are flawed adults, like womanizing son, Nicholas (Chris O'Dowd), who has a conflicted intimacy with his mother but more with himself as he wanders among showing the greatest puppy eyes in cinema. He is an emblem of the players who never seem at peace with their current or future partners.This episodic, fragmented story, whose jumping back and forth in time is occasionally disorienting, in its unsympathetic way, reveals the puzzle-like lives of sentient beings who witness death, go through its mourning rituals, and search for love, carnal and otherwise, in, it would seem, a hedge against oblivion.Co-writer/director Russell Harbaugh, in a promising debut, navigates smoothly in rough affective waters, saving the best scenes by interspersing them among some fairly quotidian events that play naturally to the death motif. When alcoholic son, Chris (James Adomian), does a standup about the difficulty of Jesus competing with his Father, the metaphor is not lost but not heavy-handed either. Both sons are struggling to compete with dad and themselves.Love After Love is a satisfying drama about all of us in families we know have dysfunctional working parts but who are on the greatest quest of all for love after love, after love, after love, forever.

We had hopes for this film, but it seems that it was all over the place. While we're fans of Andie MacDowell and some of the other cast members, the writing and directing was so poor that it brought down the actors, through no fault of their own. Of eight of us, nobody could relate to any of the characters. The writing seemed all over the place. We're not exactly sure what the real issues were - if there was just one major problem that pulled everything down, or if everything was off in and of itself - but either way it was a waste of time and money. There are some pretty good movies around. This was no one of them.

I have seen enough films at this point to know while watching it that this was one of the first films Russell Harbaugh directed. I knew this because first, there were several instances in which scenes interrupted other scenes without rhyme or reason. This implies that several scenes were, in my opinion, cut short. There were also times when the camera lingered too long on a subject, e.g., Andie McDowell. Related to this was the omission of what probably should have been included, specifically, the consequences of every time Chris O'Dowd's character, Nicholas, cheated on his then lover. In both cases, he just moved along, and whatever consequence there was, was minimal, and the film just progressed to his next involvement.Then, there is the story line. I kept seeing an elephant in the room that no one was talking about and that was the Oedipal thing going on between Andie M. and Chris O'Dowd, as mother and son. Perhaps another film will grow out of this subject that was glaringly there and ignored. It almost felt as if the writer/director couldn't decide what should be the main story line, the emotional aftermath of the death of a family's husband/father, or the Oedipal relationship between the mother and son of that family which was highlighted once the father died.Overall, as someone who can never watch too many "relationship movies", I am glad I saw Love After Love and look forward to Harbaugh's next.