Review of Far Harbor (1996) by Jonathan T — 11 Apr 2009

A young couple invite six of their friends to spend a weekend in their posh beachside mansion in this would-be character ensemble piece oozing with ennui and stilted, pretentious, mostly vacuous dialogue.

This directoral debut of John Huddles is a perfect example of how independent filmmaking can be as unoriginal and empty as big-budget Hollywood films. Even assuming that you have a high tolerance for whiney self-indulgence and pseudo-intellectualism, it's still difficult to empathize with the eight poorly-drawn chararacters and their various plights, most of which amount to unbridled self-absorption.

Here we have a group of rich and accomplished twenty-somethings, none of whom looks old enough to have finished graduate school yet, much less old enough (or intelligent enough) to have soared to their grandiose career heights, and certainly far too young to be in the throes of mid-life crisis! The actors themselves do as much as they can with the ludicrous material, with the exception of Tracee Ross, whose eye-bulging/Greek-tragedy-scale grimacing performance is among the worst I've seen outside a Lifetime TV Movie.

Writer/director Huddles has taken on *far* more than he can chew, or is even capable of understanding... the film is outrageously derivative (see *September*, *The Big Chill*, etc.) and one can only sympathetically assume that he made this film directly upon graduating from film school without taking time to craft his own vision.

His constant efforts to imbue the film with sophistication are painfully annoying and embarassing, from the character's constant literary banter (which any well-rounded college graduate could see through as drivel) to the pheasant-with-truffles dinner to the confessional conversation in the wine cellar, to the inclusion (but ignoring of) the film's token black character and token gay couple.

Jennifer Connelly's character is virtually the only one in the film whom you don't want to strangle, perhaps because her character is highly medicated and doesn't blabber as much as the others.

Prozac, anyone?