113 min | R | February 12, 2021 | Sony Pictures Classics
Michelle Pfeiffer plays a Manhattan widow who has spent her fortune to zero and chooses to blow the rest in Paris rather than economize at home. She brings her grown son, an aging cat that houses her dead husband, and a frozen heart she refuses to thaw. Pfeiffer is electric, and the film keeps falling asleep around her.
Frances Price is a Manhattan widow who has burned through her late husband’s fortune and refuses to adjust. She liquidates what remains, converts it to cash, and decamps to a borrowed apartment in Paris with her grown son and an aging black cat. The cat carries the spirit of her dead husband Franklin. The film presents itself as a deadpan comedy of manners about genteel insolvency. What it is really about is a woman who treats feeling as a vulgarity and would rather stage her own disappearance than face what sits underneath it.
Michelle Pfeiffer plays Frances with glacial poise and exact comic timing. She delivers cruelty as if it were good manners and makes contempt look like style. Lucas Hedges plays her son Malcolm as a young man so deferential he has no shape of his own. He drifts behind his mother and absorbs her decline without protest. Valerie Mahaffey plays Mme Reynard, a lonely American widow who attaches herself to Frances with desperate cheer, and she turns neediness into the most human thing in the film. Tracy Letts voices Franklin the cat with dry menace, and Imogen Poots plays Susan, the fiancee Malcolm cannot bring himself to commit to.
Azazel Jacobs directs from a script by Patrick DeWitt, who adapts his own novel. Jacobs stages the Paris scenes in warm low light and crowds the borrowed apartment with candles and antique furniture, so the frame always looks more alive than the people inside it. The editing lets scenes run long past their punchlines, which drains the comedy of momentum and leaves the deadpan exposed. The score leans on plinking fairy-tale cues that signal a whimsy the story never earns. DeWitt fills the apartment with eccentrics, including Danielle Macdonald as Madeleine the medium and Isaach de Bankolé as Julius, but the procession of quirks substitutes incident for feeling.
The film wants the chill of a drawing-room comedy and the ache of a genuine elegy, and it cannot hold both at once. Pfeiffer commits fully to a woman who has decided that style is a substitute for survival, and every scene she anchors has snap. The scenes around her go slack. Jacobs keeps the tone so cool and the pace so unhurried that the emotional reckoning the ending reaches for never lands with weight. What remains is a beautifully appointed shrug, carried by a lead performance that deserves a sharper film around it.