Heights (2005)

Starring: Glenn Close, Elizabeth Banks, James Marsden, Jesse Bradford, Thomas Lennon, Matt Davis

First, the Lowdown: Five New Yorkers have to decide between their own complacent path and the life they want.

On stage a leather-jacketed Lord Macbeth is goaded to murder by his Lady, who presses a revolver into his hand to complete his bloody deed. The players are interrupted by their teacher, Diana Lee, who reminds scorns them for taking a simple task of quiet assassination in Shakespeare's drama and twisting it into a scene out of Scarface. “We have lost passion,” she wails to her students and challenges them to take a risk sometime during the next week before dismissing class.

Diana's daughter, Isabel, has been eking out an living as a wedding photographer – a job that she finds stressful because it disrupts her own personal photography and only emphasizes how stressful her own big day is going to be in the next few months. Her fiancé, Jonathan, has stressors of his own as he is Jewish and Isabel is not. Complicating this is Diana, who is insisting on dressing Isabel like a Shakespearean fairy for her wedding.

Meanwhile Alec, who lives in the same building as the couple to be, has a dilemma of his own. He has an audition for an Off-Broadway production, which will finally pull him away from his position as a cater-waiter and the tidbits of acting that is available for people working for free (namely the Fringe Festival). What he didn't know (like all good actors should prior to auditioning) is that the play he is trying out for is directed by Diana Lee. This fact puts him ill at ease.

At the audition, Diana is rather impressed by Alec's performance (perhaps TOO impressed, wink-nudge) and invites him to a soirée that she is hosting with the most prominent of New York's art community. Alec has to respectfully decline as he has an important date with someone that evening. Further frustrating Diana is the fact her husband has stopped flirting discreetly with her understudy and instead has brought it out in the open.

Meanwhile, Peter has arrived at the offices of Vanity Fair and is greeted by the editor. Peter has arrived from London to help out with the article Vanity Fair is doing about Peter's boyfriend – renowned photographer Benjamin Stone. More specifically, they want a perspective of Benjamin Stone given by the artist's models – all of which Benjamin has dated and/or slept with. In his search, one of the first people Peter contacts is Jonathan, who thought he had put that dalliance behind him (both emotionally and legally.)

Heights is voyeuristic in the the same way that watching a confrontation on Jerry Springer is voyeuristic, only without the chanting audience and bouncers. After the first half-hour we have a pretty good idea of the setup, and in the next half-hour it becomes more obvious to us that our players are going to react when the chips are down.

If anything, this movie reifies how frustrating it can be to stay in a rut and the motivations that people have to be in them. The more Isabel thinks about her upcoming marriage, the less sure she is about it. Conversely, the more Jonathan worries about his past biting him in the ass, the more he clings to being married. Peter realizes that the “errand” he is on was nothing more than a contrivance for Benjamin Stone to fuck around, but has a choice to keep flagellating himself with denial or step away from it. Finally, Alec's important meeting (that he may have jeopardized his audition with by skipping a party for) is all about him being sick and tired of the habit he's gotten into with his partner.

Over all of this presides Diana. While she really has no rut she is trying to break free from (if anything she stays firmly in her own idiom even though it sometimes hurts her), Diana is the hub from where all of our stories are connected to. Although it is established that Diana will be performing as Lady Macbeth in an upcoming production, director Chris Terrio thankfully avoids using any subtext from that play in his film. I kept waiting for Diana to be cruelly manipulative, but instead an entirely different character emerged.

Line of the movie: “Know what you should do? You should fuck them, and I mean that literally – fuck them all for revenge.”

Four stars. Everything's coming up roses.