(2007)2.5Derek ArmstrongThe abstract title Death in Love should be a good tip-off that writer-director Boaz Yakin has contradictory ideas fighting for control of his brain. To understand just how many requires seeing the movie. The risk when tackling a boatload of issues, however, is that you won't be able to convince the audience they all belong in the same movie. Yakin's ideas succumb to that here. They're woven together randomly, they produce neither a clear message nor an abstruse one, and they have little concretely to do with either death or love.
Death in Love opens in the grubby hallway of a prison hospital. A gaunt young woman walks past a succession of moaning victims, whose mutilations and injuries resemble something out of Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder. As the woman enters a small room occupied by an Aryan doctor, whom she immediately seduces, the setting is revealed -- this is the Holocaust, and sex is a currency for survival. Flash forward 50 years, and this woman's son (Josh Lucas) is dissecting what it means for the sexual being to grow old, as disconnected images of a scalpel cutting flesh fill the screen. It turns out he's bemoaning turning 40 in the form of a diatribe delivered to one of his lovers, who provide him with empty masochistic gratification. Outside the bedroom, the son is involved in trying to find a new place of residence for his younger brother (Lukas Haas), an agoraphobic pianist still living with their parents (Jacqueline Bisset and Stu Richel), despite the fact that he consistently heaps abuse on them. The older son tries to give his own life a purpose by working as a coach of acting hopefuls, who were recruited precisely because they're too unattractive and too untalented to ever get cast. He's so deeply invested that he barely recognizes his agency's work as a scam, but a young new co-worker (Adam Brody) arrives on the scene to challenge his assumptions and present him with an opportunity. Meanwhile, elsewhere in New York, his mother flies into rages over the secrets that torture her, as she takes out her confusion on her sons and a handful of illicit lovers.
Despite Yakin's steadfast avoidance of certain basic narrative conventions, such as naming his characters, his film can't quite be called pretentious. That would require a consistency of vision and approach, and at least some flair in the execution. Instead, Yakin haphazardly juxtaposes his variety of psychosexual hot buttons -- not always artlessly, but varying wildly in quality from one scene to the next. At some points, Lucas, Bisset, et al. are nearly convincing; at other times, Yakin's on-the-nose dialogue reduces them to stiff philosophical constructs from an undergraduate play. Yakin means to toy with the complexities of sexual and emotional relationships, to make his characters look inward for answers to their aimless, ingrained yearnings. But summarizing his intentions in this way is too generous, as it requires us to extrapolate his goals from a string of narrative failings. Because this movie came from the same man who directed the populist Denzel Washington vehicle Remember the Titans, Death in Love is even more difficult to contextualize, though some of its imagery is surely influenced by Yakin's experience as executive producer on Hostel and Hostel Part II.
A number of the film's thematic elements -- the French-Jewish ancestry of Bisset's character, for one -- function on some level as autobiographical studies of Yakin's own heritage. But, ultimately, these nuggets are shrouded in abstraction, buried too deeply to extract. Even when art is too personal for the artist to effectively translate, the consumer of that art should still feel some sense of the intended catharsis. Don't confuse Death in Love's climactic histrionics as catharsis, however; what's come before is just too disjointed and ponderous to deserve that characterization. More appropriate would be to label it an overwrought exclamation point at the end of an incomplete sentence.
Writer/director Boaz Yakin explores the burdens carried by the descendants of those who survived with this family drama about a woman (Jacqueline Bisset) who managed to live through her harrowing stint in a Nazi concentration camp, and her two dysfunctional sons. Having managed to survive in a Nazi concentration camp by seducing the doctor who carried out experimental surgeries on the prisoners, a young Jewish woman moves to New York and starts a family. Years later, her two grown sons seem poised to become casualties of their mother's desperate past. Her eldest son (Josh Lucas) works at a fraudulent modeling agency that profits off the dreams of fame seekers. His psychosexual escapades and intellectual diatribes act as a barrier to the outside world, yet just when it seems that his life has lost all meaning, a charming young co-worker (Adam Brody) helps him to realize that in order to survive, he will have to embrace change. Meanwhile, the highly erratic mother and her younger son (Lukas Haas) have become locked in a compulsive, co-dependent cycle that now threatens to consume them both.
