Starring: Natalie Portman, Charlie Tahan, Scott Cohen, Lisa Kudrow
Director: Don Roos
Category: IIA
Made in 2009 and premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival that year, Don Roos' adaptation of Ayelet Waldman's novel was destined for a straight-to-video existence until its lead actress, Natalie Portman, swept the board at this year's award ceremonies with her barn-storming role as a psychologically damaged ballerina in The Black Swan.
So it's only fair distributors cash in on the Portman buzz with this belated release of Love and Other Impossible Pursuits. The American-Israeli actress carries the film with a turn incorporating the nuances that Roos' storytelling lacks as she plays out the mental complexities of a young, headstrong woman forced to confront her reputation as a home-wrecker, her on-off relationship with her stepson and the unrelenting grief at the death of her three-day-old daughter.
Never resorting to simple histrionics, Portman is remarkable as Emilia Greenleaf, who begins the film as a seemingly blas?New Yorker who goes to an elementary school to pick up William (Charlie Tahan, above with Portman). Braving the disparaging glances of other mothers at the school entrance - they loathe her for being the 'other woman' who brought to an end the marriage of William's parents - she tries her best to bond with her uptight stepson as she brings him home, despite his insistence in acting cool and spiky.
The bubbling friction comes to a head when William suggests Emilia sell her baby-rearing products on eBay as she no longer needs them now. It is only at this point that Emilia explodes.
Her husband, Jack (Scott Cohen), William's father, tries awkwardly to intervene over dinner. It is a sequence that sets the tone for both the film and Portman's performance: rather than a hackneyed narrative that pits an incredibly kind-hearted step-mother against an obnoxious child, Roos' take offers Emilia as an emotionally flawed individual who wants William's love, but can't get it, and tolerates the boy's verbal transgressions with as much patience as her youth can muster.