CHESAPEAKE PERFORMANCE

Caught up with a couple over the weekend:

The Baltimorons--Appropriate for September or not, this one is a Christmas movie. It stars Michael Strassner as Cliff, an unemployed improv comic and recovering alcoholic with a single, inept suicide attempt to his credit. He's quite the sad sack, but he's sort of funny, and he's honestly been trying to get his act together for the sake of his worried girlfriend Brittany (Olivia Luccardi). 

Disaster strikes when he has a dental emergency on Christmas Eve. He manages to find a newly divorced dentist, Didi (Liz Larsen) willing if not happy to come into her office late in the day. By the time she's finished working on him, however, his car has been towed, so she wearily offers him a ride, and the two can't seem to shake each other's company after that. Wacky misadventures ensue.

Directed by Jay Duplass, who co-wrote the script with Strassner, this low-budget indie really might put you in the Christmas spirit, since it's about looking out for strangers when you probably would rather not. It's somewhat in the vein of odd couple road comedies like Planes, Trains and Automobiles or Due Date, but The Baltimorons rings true in a way those laboriously-carpentered films don't. Strassner's face, fleshy and boyish behind whiskers, wins our sympathy quickly, and Larsen shades her performance as Didi with great skill, taking her believably from harried irritability to seductive warmth.

It's also a love letter to the great city of Baltimore, through the holiday-empty streets of which the characters chase after cheer, to the accompaniment of Christmas jazz by Jordan Seigel in style of Vince Guaraldi's Peanuts music. We see the rowhouses and the Key Bridge, pre-collapse. At one point Cliff and Didi even do a little Christmas Eve crabbing.

If you hurry, you can catch this gem, still playing on a few screens here in the Valley through at least Thursday.

Also still playing in the multiplexes:

Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale--At this writing I have still never seen an episode of Downton Abbey (ITV; 2010-2015), but I saw the two previous feature films (2019 and 2022). I'm also a big fan of HBO's The Gilded Age, the other period series by Julian Fellowes about the lifestyles of the rich and famous, and their servants. Gilded Age is set in America, and thus is all vigorous drive and enterprise and new horizons.

Downton Abbey, by contrast, set mostly in rural England, is sedate and idyllic. Allowing for the limitations of their circumstances, the members of Crawley family, led by patriarch Hugh Bonneville, are decent enough sorts, befuddled at how difficult and expensive it is to keep the title pile of bricks in decent repair. By the time we've reached this last chapter, directed by Simon Curtis and set in 1930, the mood is all sunset melancholy and the wistful acceptance that the social system within which these people have always lived is swiftly receding.

The opulence of the setting notwithstanding, this Grand Finale doesn't feel particularly grand; as with the two earlier films, it's a relaxing, undemanding holiday, not only from our time and circumstances, but from any judgements we might have about what we're seeing. Grumbling about class implications in a story like this would be like complaining about the social order in Shakespeare or Sophocles, not because Fellowes is on the level of those writers (he's not) but because it's what must be accepted to access a story from that world.

Despite the much-acknowledged absence of the late Maggie Smith, the cast is full of veterans like Bonneville, Elizabeth McGovern, Jim Carter, Penelope Wilton, Dominic West, Paul Giamatti, Alessandro Nivola, Arty Froushan--as Noel Coward, who comes to dinner--Simon Russell Beale, Kevin Doyle, Joely Richardson and many others, all confident as ever. But as in the earlier films, Michelle Dockery, as Lady Mary, divorced and wryly put-out to find herself a figure of scandal, is the closest the ensemble has to a leading lady, and the source of much of the movie's fun.

Here's what a byword the very name "Robert Redford" once was for male beauty...

A group shot from the 1980 senior yearbook at Your Humble Narrator's dear old Harbor Creek High for the National Honor Society (I'm not in it, you'll observe): My friend Mike's thought balloon says "Eat your heart out Robert Redfert [sic]"; my friend Karen, in the row in front of him, is thinking "I'll take Bobby R."

Peace and joy eternal great man, and thank you for the memories.