“For Worse” is a comedy of divorce, written, directed by, and starring Amy Landecker. Landecker is a “Who is that? I know her!” character actress whose filmography includes Prime Video series “Transparent.” This is her first feature as a writer-director. It should be the first of many.
Landecker plays Lauren, a former actress turned real estate agent who just split up with Chase (Paul Adelstein), the father of their adorable daughter Kim (Caroline Miller). Adding insult to injury, Chase has a new girlfriend named Sara (Angelique Cabral) who’s a lot younger than he is—an “influencer” who gives health and happiness advice and has such a strong connection with their daughter already that Lauren’s starting to feel as if her daughter divorced her, too.
Lauren decides to get back into acting and enrolls in a class focused on training performers to win television commercial auditions. The teacher, Liz, is a haughty, pretentious woman who insists that commercial acting is an art form in its own right. Landecker’s “Transparent” co-star Gaby Hoffman plays Liz as an intense, humorless woman who casually insults people without realizing it (or caring about it) and seems oblivious to anyone else’s opinion of her personality or methods. She’s kind of woman who signals that it’s time to do a scene by rocketing one arm up high over her head and grandly announcing, “Places!!”
Liz’s class becomes a gateway into a world Lauren wouldn’t otherwise visit. The other students are 20 years younger and bring a wealth of experience (plus pop culture references and slang) so unfamiliar to her that they might as well have been written in Sanskrit on a tablet. She feels shut out until she dazzles them with her subtle delivery of a monologue. After that, they treat her like she’s a beloved hipster aunt who lives in a downtown loft apartment over a microbrewery.
Lauren comes to realize that the kids are goodhearted and see her as a fellow human being, not a demographic example (although there is some realistically painful ageism later in the movie, involving different characters). She even gets invited to the wedding of one classmate, Maria (Kiersey Clemons). Maria is a femme lesbian who’s going to marry her butch partner Justine (Briana Venskus) in a fancy hotel, during a wedding weekend paid for by her mom Debbie (Enuka Okuma) and her stepfather Chuck (Jay Lacopo) and attended by her dad, Dave (Bradley Whitford). (This is a forward-facing movie in terms of LGBTQIA+ representation, in that it doesn’t feel as if it’s righting past wrongs of Hollywood but presenting scenarios that exist and are no big deal.) Even if you didn’t know that Landecker and Whitford are married and produced this movie together, you’d expect Dave and Lauren to get together eventually, because the two have a palpable onscreen spark, plus it’s the kind of thing that happens in films like this.
She also gets to spend quality time with another fellow student, Sean (Nico Hiraga), who makes women lightheaded just by walking into a room. To Lauren’s astonishment, Sean volunteers to be her partner in a scene about a sex worker and their client and invites her to study the text in-depth at his apartment, where the only non-alcoholic beverage is tapwater, and the only decent place to sit is a futon that does double-duty as a bed. This is thrilling for Lauren, even though she’s wise enough to suspect that a relationship with a ridiculously hot, laid-back, polite twenty-something (Hiraga has young Keanu Reeves energy) can’t last.
The outline of the story will be familiar to anyone who’s seen a few romantic comedies about divorced people starting new lives. Specific elements may remind viewers of Bradley Cooper’s recent divorce comedy “Is This Thing On?,” in particular the scenes where a character powers through the misery of a failed marriage by studying a performing art (standup comedy in Cooper’s movie, screen acting here). The Hollywood milieu might be a little too familiar. People who’ve never been anywhere near a film or TV set know industry slang like “I booked a national,” thanks to the innumerable inside-showbiz comedies, film and television that have been made, mostly for premium cable, over the past thirty-odd years (Garry Shandling’s “The Larry Sanders Show” might’ve started it all).
It’s a film that’s better acted and written than directed; like many actors-turned-filmmakers, Landecker too often treats the camera as a device to record performances rather than a multifaceted instrument that can conjure beauty. Still, there are more than a few striking directorial choices here (a couple of which involve the emotionally expressive use of slow motion) that hint that Landecker could master that job, too, given a few more opportunities like this one. This is a more-than-solid observational comedy with a melancholy undertone, reminiscent of early Albert Brooks movies like “Modern Romance.”
The script is filled with sharp dialogue, and there are many moments of authentic human connection between the characters. It sounds to this ear as if some of the dialogue was improvised, but it’s impossible to tell for sure because Landecker has a knack for making the most contrived or cliched setups feel organic, and the performers seem to intuitively understand that in a movie like this, they can’t get caught making choices; they have to just be.
Hoffman’s performance is an example. It has the coercive dynamism of Tom Cruise playing a gifted but self-involved go-getter character who would rather die than quit. That’s a fascinating aura for a character who is a slender woman who goes braless and barefoot in her own classroom, brings her tiny dog Kiki to class, runs her assistant ragged, and is too physically familiar with her students (not sexually; she treats them like furniture, leaning on one as if he were a chair). She’ s at risk of turning into human cartoon, but Hoffman and the script keep her grounded. Liz is such a richly written character, and Hoffman’s performance is so on, that she could carry her own TV series.
The same could be said for most of the characters, including a few who only get one or two scenes, or just a few seconds, to shine. Keep an eye out for Spencer Stevenson as Todd, Justine’s fabulous gay brother, who joins Lauren in a smoke break and makes a believable instant connection with her; and Carlos Valdez as Liz’s assistant and dog wrangler, who has the haunted look of a man in a hostage situation.
The wedding has the sorts of knucklehead slapstick events you expect to see in a romantic comedy, but as in the rest of the film, the actors put so much skill and heart into every second that you believe you’re seeing things that could actually happen. Landecker is a real talent, and her rapport with Whitford is so charming and real that it’s easy to picture them as the 21st century answer to Nick and Nora Charles in the ‘Thin Man” films, flirting and bantering their way through murder mysteries. Be sure to watch the credits all the way through. There’s one that will make you laugh out loud.
