The story is about a 30-something Jewish wife and mother who has become uninterested in sex with her husband. Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) has had a dry spell for some months and sees a shrink (Jane Lynch) for her problem. Her husband, Jeff (Josh Radnor), has created some popular apps so they are pretty comfortably set--not "rich" but above a normal paygrade, that's for sure. Rachel's lifestyle among some other Jewish wives is one where they do charity work and go for massages while their kids are in school, but Rachel considers herself a step or two above them intellectually as she once had aspirations to be a war correspondent (an intelligence we see little of, frankly).
A friend suggests the couple go to a strip club to get their juices going. Rachel and Jeff do so, and Rachel gets a lap dance from McKenna (Juno Temple), a young stripper. Although we can tell Rachel is somewhat and reluctantly aroused it does not solve her problem. Later Rachel sees McKenna by chance in the street and pretends to bump into her and starts a conversation.
McKenna is pretty open about her way of life and non-judgmental and Rachel likes to think that she herself is too. She invites McKenna back to the house and tells her friends she is the new nanny, and Rachel's husband is not sure where she is going with this. McKenna is physically more confident than Rachel as well. She touches her in friendly ways that makes Rachel, as in the strip club, both uneasy and aroused, yet not wanting to admit she has these sexual appetites because that would mean her marital problem is hers and nothing to do with sex. Rachel appears to think McKenna needs some salvation and she, Rachel, is the one to provide it, and this setup proves poisonous, mostly due to Rachel's misguided actions. Due to a badly phrased and probably condescending comment about her, McKenna purposely does something which breaks Rachel's social circle apart, but forces Rachel and her husband to come to terms with the larger meaning of their marital problems.
The comedy parts of the movie (mostly those involving the shrink and the women in Rachel's social circle) doesn't fit well with the serious parts of the story, that would be the major flaw for me. The portrayals of these characters, though, feel real for the most part, although by the end of the story the film treats the character of McKenna as less of a real person than it does with Rachel. We only see McKenna hanging with friends in the street as if "oh she's alright, we don't have to worry about her anymore" and we don't get any interaction between her and Rachel, which would have been key to let us to empathize with McKenna more and see her view on how people make assumptions about her and her profession. We do sympathize with McKenna somewhat as we see how Rachel's foolish behavior was naive and misguided, thinking she was saving someone who didn't think her situation was something she needed to be saved from. In a nutshell, Rachel thinks she is better than most people and confronts this in different ways with her friends and family.
No comments:
Post a Comment