Not that I’m a skeezy deejay and we’re opening up the request line here at Shared Darkness, but a reader e-asked me about the Uma Thurman flick Prime a couple days ago, and so I thought I’d drop this slightly tweaked and redacted review, originally published to coincide with the film’s DVD release, and penned for a site that still owes me money. To wit:



Hollywood will take a few chances on young talent here and there, particularly when there’s a would-be filmmaker that won’t let them pry away a script to hand over to some hot, of-the-moment commercial director. It happened with Troy Duffy and The Boondock Saints, and it happened in 2000 with writer-director Ben Younger and Boiler Room, a sort of pre-Enron mash-up of Wall Street and The Firm for the Gen-X millennial set in which a college dropout quickly rises the ladder at a suburban securities and investment firm only to discover seedy goings-on. Unfortunately, though, commercial grosses are often misread as qualitative tea leaves, and when Boiler Room pulled in under $17 million at the box office despite the presence of a marquee young cast including Ben Affleck in a supporting role, Younger went from Next Big Thing to Just Another Forgotten Thing.

2005’s romantic comedy Prime represents his return, and it’s in some small ways triumphant while in most other ways right in lockstep with his debut — interesting and awkward, and more packed with promise than fulfillment. Despite the presence of a post-Kill Bill Uma Thurman and exalted national treasure Meryl Streep, Prime did hardly better in its theatrical release ($22 million domestically), the result of a somewhat lackluster promotional campaign that couldn’t convincingly sell the movie’s offbeat sense of humor, and/or convince audiences to come see a film in which the male romantic lead was a virtual unknown.

The story centers around career-driven 37-year-old Rafi Gardet (Thurman), who finds herself on the relationship rebound with 23-year-old aspirant painter David (Bryan Greenburg, of the short-lived HBO series Unscripted), the doted-upon son of Gardet’s very Jewish psychoanalyst, Lisa Metzger (Streep). The more Rafi tells Lisa about her new young fling, the more Lisa catches on to his true identity, and so she tries to subtly nudge both parties away from continuing the relationship. It’s a great concept, but a lot of the trite relationship stuff rings relatively false, and proxy Greenburg can’t quite pull the weight of his part. Still, upon further consideration, the movie plays better on the small screen, where one can more fully give into the joys of Streep’s pitch-perfect performance.

Younger has an idiosyncratic taste and voice, as evidenced by a subplot in which David’s friend Morris (Jon Abrahams) seeks revenge on a woman who spurns him by thrusting banana crème pies in her face. In some ways both of his films have had palettes too large for conventional genre pieces; you can tell he takes great delight in writing tangential bits, and for supporting characters, and when required to push forward the chief narrative boulder he falls back on clichés that are beneath him. While neither of his studio films have completely wowed me in aggregate, Younger seems like he would be better suited toward more intimate, indie-scaled productions, like those of Whit Stillman, Noah Baumbach and Nicole Holofcener.

DVD extras on Prime's single-disc release include nine minutes of cast and crew interviews in which Streep praises Younger as having “the confidence of an old soul,” and producer Jennifer Todd talks about her initial attraction to the material. Eight minutes of deleted scenes feature all kinds of interstitial bits, odds and ends, and showcase in unique fashion the challenges of feigning a loud party scene with no music. Also included are four minutes of outtakes, though these are frequently less outrageous bloopers than halting, alternative versions of scenes, with a few laughs thrown in for good measure. C+ (Movie) C+ (Disc)