***½/****
starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kathy Bates, Jack Kehler, Sarah Koskoff
screenplay by Gordy Hoffman
directed by Todd Louiso
by Bill Chambers Love Liza is a potent movie about compulsive behaviour I'm growing fonder of by the hour; the film rises above some hoary tropes to become almost peerlessly unsettling. As a new widower who can't bring himself to read his wife's suicide note, Philip Seymour Hoffman once again dissolves before our eyes into a sweaty, ticcy mess stuck between sleep and awake. But here, without the reprieves you get from his strange behaviour in the ensemble pieces the actor seems to favour (Boogie Nights, Happiness), Hoffman's performance becomes truly confrontational–we're forced to do our best to not only tolerate him, but also empathize with him. Hoffman's Wilson Joel reduces himself to human pudding through a sudden, overwhelming addiction to huffing gasoline, an arduous habit the film treats comically at first by having Wilson blame his sulphuric odour on a model-airplane hobby, which of course requires him to go out and actually buy a model airplane when a co-worker introduces him to R/C enthusiast Denny (Jack Kehler, in an impossibly sincere performance). Before we know it, we've been snookered into a cautionary tale far more disquieting than, say, Requiem for a Dream, because the film acknowledges, in an almost Hitchcockian manner, the treacherousness of the mundane. It's unfortunate that first-time director Todd Louiso (he played the meek record store employee in High Fidelity) and writer Gordy Hoffman (Philip Seymour's older brother) resort to romanticizing the dead spouse to a Hollywood degree (not only is she impossibly beautiful, but our only substantial glimpse of her is a nude one), though it appears the aim of the film's poetic conclusion to undercut, nay, humanize her. Depressing but rewarding, the experience of Love Liza is a difficult one to encapsulate. Or shake. PROGRAM: CONTEMPORARY WORLD CINEMA
