Review of The Oranges (2011) by Greg W — 05 Mar 2014

Quirky comedy about two super-close families who are thrown for a loop when the daughter of one family becomes romantically involved with the father of the other one. It's sometimes laugh out loud funny. It's weird, too. Nothing too great or too awful. It sort of hangs in the middle, to me.

Some people may have an issue with the fact that this movie seems to take the idea of a married man sleeping with a woman half his age very lightly. And it does, to me. The situations afterwards are often comical and mostly devoid of the kind of emotional turmoil a relationship like this would cause. If one can accept that this movie doesn't want to be dramatic about it all, you should be okay.

I've read a review that believes the movie's philosophy ("Sometimes you have to burn your house down to see the moon.") is hedonistic. I didn't see it that way. Given the context in which it is spoken, and the end results of everything, I took it to mean that sometimes you reaaaally have to screw things up before you can see beauty, or the big picture. Vanessa accentuates this when she says in voice-over that she does not blame Nina for everything that has happened, because perhaps what happened *needed* to happen. The characters begin to do things in their lives that they otherwise would not have if things hadn't gotten so incredibly bad. Nina's selfish and immature shenanigans are merely the catalyst in which they are finally inspired to move and improve themselves. Although the movie, like I said, deals with everything lightly, there is a sort of message in here that one can take as not trumpeting the wonders of hedonistic pursuits of pleasure, but actually speaking a kind of truth to the human experiences of loss, pain, and gigantic mistakes temporarily disguised as happiness. Good can come from even the worst of situations.