Review: Love Liza

From the folks that brought you bad lounge music, the rack focus and the social faux pas comes Love Liza.

Love Liza
Photo: Sony Pictures Classics

From the folks that brought you bad lounge music, the rack focus and the social faux pas comes Love Liza, a tale of grief that is at once giddily off-the-wall and completely insufferable. Written by Gordy Hoffman as a vanity project for brother Philip Seymour, this somber 90-minute sketch comedy follows a widower in small-town America as he attempts to score gasoline for his next high, accidentally becomes a model airplane aficionado and screams really loudly. Wilson is a total mess after his wife Liza’s suicide (conveniently revealed when the local newspaper’s obit department gives him a call): he’s taken to sleeping on the floor, forgets to take the tag off his new shirt and laughs at really bad jokes. While Wilson is out huffing, his mother-in-law (Kathy Bates) keeps the cement ledge outside his front door warm and creeps out the local neighbor girl when she tells her Liza isn’t home. (Why make things easy for the little brat when you can make her wig out with a sitcom misunderstanding?) Love Liza will have a difficult time distinguishing itself from Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt, another widower-in-chaos comedy starring Bates in an undervalued role. Love Liza is nowhere near as condescending but its shrill pitch makes it just as difficult to take. No one on screen can compete with the haggard Philip Seymour, who spends 90 minutes freaking out for anyone willing to watch. The film never decides whether it wants to take poor Wilson’s grief seriously or as a source of laughter. What with the incessant lounge music playing in the film’s background, you may mistake Love Liza for an Adam Sandler Chanukah song.

Score: 
 Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kathy Bates, Jack Kehler, Sarah Koskoff, Stephen Tobolowsky, Shannon Holt, Erika Alexander, Pauline Boyd, Kevin Breznahan  Director: Todd Louiso  Screenwriter: Gordy Hoffman  Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics  Running Time: 90 min  Rating: R  Year: 2002  Buy: Video

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

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