A spare but winning romantic drama that taps into the same talky, intellectually stimulating vein as Richard Linklater’s Sunrise/Sunset collaborations with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, The Trouble with the Truth is cinematic catnip for anyone who fancies themselves a student of the human condition. Written and directed by Jim Hemphill, this intimate bauble serves as a great showcase for actors Lea Thompson and John Shea, and a reminder that human desire doesn’t expire at 35 years of age.
On the heels of learning that their 24-year-old daughter Jenny (Danielle Harris) is engaged to be married, middle-aged divorcées Bob (Shea) and Emily (Thompson) get together for a dinner, their first in years. Bob is a Los Angeles-based musician who prides himself on his low economic overhead; remarried and living on the East Coast, Emily is a successful author who’s worried that she’s becoming “dull by osmosis” via her new husband. Over dinner, the pair find themselves reminiscing over what went wrong, and what was right in their relationship. As they slide into an alcohol-enabled haze of nostalgia, the question comes into focus — are they up for a passionate one-night stand, willing to give it another go as a couple, perhaps even both, or neither?
The Trouble with the Truth isn’t as stylistically audacious as Hans Canosa’s 2006 drama Conversations with Other Women, another playful adult love story, starring Aaron Eckhart and Helena Bonham Carter, that kept both leads on the screen for the entirety of its 84-minute running time. Shot on Canon DSLRs, its austerity sometimes gets the best of it. Still, this movie is an actors’ piece, and in this regard it succeeds mightily. Bob and Emily are at a place where they can let down their respective guards and simply let fly with their true feelings, with no worries of how inartfully phrased they may be. They “get” each other — deeply and realistically, in the ways that a couple with a turbulent shared history that spans many years of late twenty- and thirtysomething life truly can.
In spirit, Hemphill’s movie certainly owes a debt to Linklater’s previously mentioned films, along with My Dinner with Andre and other similar chatty, philosophically-minded flicks; The Trouble with the Truth is a bit like a re-stitched, backward-glance He Said, She Said, in which both perspectives of a relationship are laid up against one another, conversationally. The deeper in a viewer gets, the more its characters matter to them. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Winning Edge Partners, R, 96 minutes)
NOTE: The Trouble with the Truth opens this week in Los Angeles at the Egyptian and Aero Theatres, where Lea Thompson and others will appear in person at select screenings. For more information, visit the movie’s website or its Facebook page.