Enough Said Review

Written: 2013 Directed: Nicole Holofcener 2013

Enough Said is a funny, endearing, intelligent, beautifully realized film.

First, it's a fantastic script. Eva (Julie-Louise Dreyfus) is a middle-aged masseur and divorced mom whose kid is about to go off to college. She feels like her life isn't going anywhere and dating is an inane chore. She happens to meet Albert (James Gandolfini) at a party and as they get to know each other she finds she's falling for him. When she accidently discovers her new client is Albert's ex-wife (Catherine Keener) she can't help but get all the dirt on everything that's wrong with him. She starts seeing Albert through the lens his ex-wife has created and we get to compassionately cringe through her trying to sort it all out.

Julie Louise-Dreyfus is also so beautifully brilliant in this. The wonderful off-kilter insecurity her characters are known for is played masterfully here, revealing in it that relatable desire to avoid getting hurt, to protect ourselves from more bad decisions and that we're all just trying to figure it out as we go along. And leave it to her to make this mess funny, endearing, relatable and immensely entertaining. Also, with all the hoopla around actresses and aging, we get to see a woman who looks her age and makes it look natural and beautiful, devours this smart, funny, complex roll with mastery that only she could pull off and gives us the feeling that she's just getting started, leaving us wanting more.

And it's one of James Gandolfini’s (The Sopranos) last films and it's consistently clear why he will always be a big deal. He brings all the emotional complexity to Albert that this film needed to be great. As we start to see Eva fixate on the qualities of Albert that the ex-wife hated, he humorously reveals all those warts without ever loosing the sense that Eva still is loosing perspective on him. He teases out great questions about love - how do we live with our partner's warts and what warts are ok and which become insidiously intolerable? And, what's the context? Is it someone else's hang-ups we're projecting, are they are own hang-ups or are they true red flags that spell disaster? The film doesn't force an answer and prefers to show instead the danger of dehumanization that can happen when we work too hard not to get hurt.

It explores in a fresh, funny way great questions about relationships and freewill. How much do we take into account what other people have to say about people we fall for, especially when they have a long history together. Should we be influenced to avoid a bad experience or should we trust our own feelings about the person? What I love most about this film is it really leaves you asking what you would do in that situation and there's no simple answer. It's easy to find ourselves in that dilemma and in that we fault Dreyfus for nothing and only thank her for adding levity to all of our ups and downs of love.