ZACHARY BOOTH AND PATRICIA CLARKSON IN LAST WEEKEND

Well-made film about California rich that's more pretty than moving

It’s nice to see Patricia Clarkson starring in a movie. She’s an accomplished actress who has usually had secondary or low-keyed roles, but here, the action revolves around her. She is always impeccable. This is her strength and her weakness. She lends class to any production. But if only she had some rough edges!

The title gives it away: this is Labor Day Weekend and it's the last weekend before the big family resort house on Lake Tahoe goes on the market, because Celia Green (Clarkson), the family matriarch, has decided to sell it, though she isn’t officially saying so. Her husband is the strong silent type. He exists only for a hug when needed and to tell her she’s not making a mistake. He made the money. These are rich white people. Sort of old nouveau riches. They didn’t inherit wealth, but they’ve had it long enough to look down on the dot com and app millionaires who got rich recently. The house signals the mystery of their status. It could be pre-war, but they couldn’t have owned it that long.

This is frankly a movie that revolves around real estate. This too is a strength and weakness. It’s a fascinating subject, but it’s one that needs to be peripheral to human drama, and here it threatens to take center stage, the only topic that resonates and remains mysterious. At intervals the camera provides still views of the interior and exterior of the beautifully lived-in-looking house, with its many comfortable but quietly posh objects, its vast manicured and watered lawn, its views of the lake. But this is also a family drama in the classic mold, if in a distinctly lower key. There are no dramatic revelations or hysterical arguments as in Tracy Letts or his distinguished forebear Eugene O’Neill. Petulant older brother Roger (Joseph Cross) has something to reveal: he’s lost his stock trading company thirty million dollars by clicking the wrong tabs and is out of a job; but he reveals this only to his girlfriend and a woman he’ll never see again, Theo's TV star pal Blake Curtis (Jayna Mays). This is also a movie with a gay point of view, discreetly signaled by the fact that that gay brother, Theo (Zachary Booth, who co-starred in Ira Sachs' gay relationship saga Keep the Lights On), gets the nicest cuddles, with the new boyfriend he brings.

This movie is also about objects (Celia has a fantastic basket collection she’s giving to a museum) and beautiful views -- and being willing to relinquish both. For what? What will Celia and her husband Malcolm (the blank-looking Chris Mulkey) use the many millions from the sale of this property for? Give them to charity? Invest them to make their children even richer? Buy a castle in Tuscany or an apartment in Paris? Apparently it would be indiscreet to say. The movie has chosen a house so perfect it seems stupid to sell it. (Turns out it belongs to Tom Dolby's family and he spent holidays there; and it's also where A Place in the Sun was shot in 1951 with Liz Taylor and Monty Clift.)

The gay brother’s new boyfriend Luke (Devon Graye of TV's "Dexter") is poor. In one scene at a charity affair a neighbor lady asks him (so rude, yet so American, in so doing) what his parents do and he says, giving up the lies he’s told Theo, that they’re in building maintenance and food supply. “Oh, there’s a lot of money in that!” the lady exclaims. “No there isn’t,” he says. His discomfort has to be sorted out in private when he remarks that Theo uses seventy-five dollar cologne every morning, only takes taxis, buys objects that cost four thousand dollars. But Luke gets his moment. He’s an opera singer and while taking a shower, he sings “Nessun dorma” so Celia and his boyfriend can both hear. It’s gorgeous, and obviously he possesses something that may be worth a workout studio chain (the father’s lucrative business). We’ve had great gay opera lover scenes (in Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia) but never a gay singer scene. Like everything in this move, it’s tasteful to a fault.

A lovely voice may be better than money. But in fact, though, one trouble with Last Weekend, which despite a gentle tear or two is mostly far too impeccable to raise our blood pressure, is that it has an underlying tendency by implication to quantify and equate everything. The household staff – Hector, the grounds keeper (Julio Oscar Mechoso), is electrocuted fixing a lamp over the water and the parents must keep vigil at the hospital – Celia explains are "like family," but that does not mean they "are family." Approximately equal, not equal. There is an undercurrent of selling things. Theo wants Blake to "like" his script. She does; she says it’s "good," but what does "good" equal? He’s not sure. Roger's girlfriend Vanessa (Alexia Rasmussen) has a small business selling bottle water and she's brought boxes of it to promote. One flavor dubiously is called "Berrying You." She’s trying to get everybody to drink it, the father to use it in his gyms: to raise its value.

And that happens, because, as Last Weekend draws to a close, everything is, as far as it can be, resolved. Finally it’s Labor Day and everybody has gone, leaving Celia and Malcolm to savor the last perfect bittersweet moment. Everyone is okay with their lives again, or at least they can pretend to be. And pretend they must: Blake Curtis, the TV star, who's a recovering addict, was listening to a motivational self-respect tape while jogging. Celia didn’t tell the kids she’s selling the house, she says, because she wanted this weekend to be "like every other summer weekend." A wise and pleasant desire, perhaps, but one that leads to blandness, away from any drama. Celia is a rather odd character, because she’s someone who always wants everything to be perfect, but is also admittedly often clumsy. What is she? She’s impeccable, but a bit of a cipher. She’s Patricia Clarkson. Is this what a rich lady is like? Is this what rich people’s lives are like? Little conflicts? Decisions that aren’t revealed? Finally Roger, the brother who’s lost his job, tells their father what’s happened, though we don’t see him tell it, and says he’s gotten a headhunter but wherever he goes he feels failure over him. "We all fail," says the father, reassuringly.

Does Last Weekend itself fail? Sometimes it seems to resemble other similar dramas more in their mise-en-scène than their emotion, so we may only remember the lake views, Patricia Clarkson’s yellow hair, and "Nessun dorma." But the two Toms deserve credit for delivering a movie so elegant and so central to English and American ideas of wealth and society it makes one think, if only fleetingly, of Henry James and Virginia Woolf.

Last Weekend, , 94 mins., written by Tom Dolby, premiered 2 May 2014 at the San Francisco Film Festival. Dolby comes from privilege himself, being the son of the late noise reduction/sound system czar and businessman Ray Dolby, and a graduate of Hotchkiss and Yale. He's a multi-hyphenate writer, filmmaker, TV person, and producer who has also been a gay activist. US theatrical release of Last Weekend begins 29 August 2014, and on 12 September it comes to the San Francisco Bay Area (Vogue Theater).

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.