by Jeff Alan, Contributing Writer
I love finding movies that have solid casts and that fly so far under the radar that when I bring them up, people don’t believe it was actually released. That is the case with 2014 film, The Longest Week, which stars Jason Bateman, Billy Crudup, Olivia Wilde, and Jenny Slate. It follows Conrad Valmont (Bateman), a spoiled, trust fund, forty-year-old man who has no discernible direction in life, and is always in the “gathering stages” of writing a novel. He lives carefree on his parent’s wealth in the penthouse of their own hotel that shares their last name. But one Monday morning, he gets a call saying that his parents are divorcing, he is being removed from the penthouse, and the wealth he has constantly fallen back on has been cut off from his use.
Broke, homeless, and unemployed, he is forced to seek refuge in his best friend, Dylan Tate (Crudup), who also comes from money and agrees to let Conrad stay at his apartment for the time being. The two men discuss art and life, and attend art exhibits and events, and discuss the art in the most pretentious way possible. They both even dress as if they go to the same school attended in Gossip Girl. But on the day he is evicted, Conrad meets Beatrice (Wilde), a beautiful woman he is immediately enamored with. But there’s a small hitch: she is dating Dylan. So the film proceeds to follow Conrad’s journey through the next week of his life as he navigates his new poor lifestyle, while also trying to woo Beatrice without harming his friendship with Dylan.
The Longest Week currently sits at a 10% on Rotten Tomatoes, and rightfully so. The over-privileged nature of the characters is a bit nauseating at times. However, I was able to find a lot of positive in this film that all the reviews don’t seem to touch on at all. The first being that the cast – albeit a very small cast – is actually pretty great. Bateman is playing a character that is sort of outside what he tends to play. From Arrested Development to Horrible Bosses, he’s always played the straight-man who uses dry humor to contrast the silliness of the character he is up against. But in The Longest Week, he plays something a bit more serious, and there’s no one silly working against him, which he pulls off pretty well.
The rest of the cast does a perfectly fine job as well. Bateman teams back up with Wilde, who is always a welcome addition to any cast. Crudup plays a very normal character, and is probably the morally best character in the film. We also have Slate coming in for a shorter, more grounded performance, and Tony Roberts (of Annie Hall fame) plays a small role as Conrad’s therapist.
We’re also treated to some fascinating cinematography, which sort of mixes two different styles together. The color grading gives the film a more artsy sort of look, probably to harken back to the two male characters’ love and interest in fine art, Victorian literature, and French cinema. The camera work is where it blends to different styles together. At times, there’s a Wes Anderson feeling, where shots have a lot of symmetrical composition, and a lot of camera movements remind me of Royal Tenenbaums, especially with the backdrop of the Upper West/East Side in New York.
But at other times, and more frequently, The Longest Week reminds me so much of Woody Allen, whose films I am a fan of. It borrows elements of a Allen film in its character traits (particularly its characters’ pretentiousness with art), its cinematic love of New York City, its light jazz/piano score, and in its camera movements, like walk-and-talks down the sidewalk.
And another reason I think this film is pretty good is that it is short. It’s a quick hour and 24 minutes, there are no dead spots that drag the story out, and the film is contained! While it may stumble in some ways, this quick story has a lot of style that is admirable, if not substantive.
All in all, I understand the negative criticism of this movie and its story, but I think there’s more to it than just profiling an over-privileged man-child. If you have an affinity for the hallmarks of some prolific filmmakers, The Longest Week might be a fun Easter egg hunt of creative filmmaking techniques.
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