VOW FACTOR

Opening this week:

I Do...Until I Don't--A noxious British filmmaker (Dolly Wells) shows up in Vero Beach, Florida, to work on a documentary about marriage. The institution, she thinks, is in need of reform. Florida being the divorce capital of the world, or so she says, she starts following three married couples around with her camera, looking for (and trying to engineer) evidence to support her theory that marriage should be a seven-year contract with an option to renew.

Longtime married couples are represented by Harvey (Paul Reiser) and Cybill (Mary Steenburgen), affluent, perennially combative New York expats. Harvey walks around in a leather jacket and helmet even when he isn't riding his motorcycle; Cybill mocks him for it.

Younger specimens are Noah (Ed Helms) and his creatively frustrated wife Alice (Lake Bell). They run his late father's window blind business, which is on the verge of failure, and despite this looming financial disaster are rather halfheartedly trying to get pregnant. Also a target of the documentarian's camera and agenda are Alice's younger sister Fanny (Amber Heard) and her husband Xander (Wyatt Cenac), hippies in a theoretically open marriage.

This is the second feature written and directed by the talented Lake Bell. The actress has kept busy with prolific voice work and supporting parts, and pulled occasional nominal leading lady duty in stuff like No Escape and Million Dollar Arm. But it was with 2013's In a World...,  a screwy, uneven but original comedy about envies and career barriers in the voice-over community, that she showed her behind-the-cameras promise. I Do...Until I Don't, though by no means without strong performances and laughs, suggests, alas, a sophomore slump for Bell.

Neither the critique nor the defense of marriage presented here is anything really new. This wouldn't much matter, if the specific storylines were surprising in some way, but the characterizations, as written, are sitcom-basic--the hippie couple and the comic-villainess filmmaker are particularly weak and stereotypical. And the interweaving of the various plot strands feels awkward and uncertain.

On the upside, there are many passages of bright, funny dialogue, and Bell gets good work out of her cast, down to minor players like Chauntae Pink and Rae Grey as massage parlor workers. Bell's own performance as the sweetly complaisant, melancholy Alice, is the strongest, but Reiser and Steenburgen also develop an impressive comic rapport out of their underwritten scenes that allows us to see the touching, almost reluctant bond beneath their distracted sniping at each other. There's real venom and acid in their bickering, but no real urgency; their marital resentments have a familiarity, a low-key domestic rhythm.

Performances like this allowed me to enjoy I Do...Until I Don't quite a lot, even as I recognized its significant weaknesses and limitations. Bell has ability and vision, and I hope she gets to continue to toll.

PARTY COOPERS

Opening this weekend:

Love the Coopers—The Coopers, and their extremely First-World problems, being:

Dad (John Goodman) wants to leave mom (Diane Keaton) because he’s sick of her putting the concerns of their grown kids ahead of their own relationship. She’s talked him into sticking around for one more picturesque family Christmas in their handsome suburban Pittsburgh home.

Meanwhile, Gramps (Alan Arkin) has bonded with a young diner waitress (Amanda Seyfried) and now she’s planning to move away. Son (Ed Helms) has lost his job, and is hiding it from his family. Daughter (Olivia Wilde), dawdling in the Pittsburgh airport, meets a handsome young solider (Jake Lacy) on his way to deployment and talks him into posing as her boyfriend for the holiday in hopes of avoiding the disappointed, disapproving, worried looks of her parents.

Gee, wouldn’t it be something if two of them actually fell in love?

Middle-class whining about what a drag it is to spend time with your family at the holidays is theme which the movies have pretty thoroughly explored over the last few decades. Indeed, Keaton has already starred in a similar ensemble comedy-drama, The Family Stone, back in 2005. She’s one of the executive-producers of Love the Coopers, so she must like this sort of thing, or at least like the sort of money it can make.

Directed by Jessie Nelson from a script by Steven Rogers (which went into production under the better title The Most Wonderful Time), Love the Coopers is slickly produced and more watchable than it really deserves to be. Partly this is thanks to a Starbucks-compilation-CD-style soundtrack of genteel holiday numbers, including Sting’s lovely version of “Soul Cake.” Partly it’s because of the underrated winter beauty of Pittsburgh.

But mostly, as you might guess, it’s because of the ability of that cast to engage, even with fairly blah material. Along with the above, by the way, the ensemble includes June Squibb as a dotty old aunt, and Marisa Tomei and Anthony Mackie as, respectively, Keaton’s shoplifting sister and the cop stuck with taking her in. This promises to become the most interesting strand—Mackie gives his role a little tension and sting, and he and Tomei have a nice rapport—but it peters out without a real payoff.

There’s also narration, but both the (unmistakable) voice of the famous speaker and the identity of the narrator seem meant to be a surprise until the end credits.

FOUR, SQUARED

There seem to be certain actresses who, having attained some popularity and acclaim, are suddenly subject to a peculiar fashionable backlash. Jennifer Aniston has been a major star for almost twenty years now, but I can only think of one person I know who would admit to liking her.

Except me, that is. I like her. She isn’t, perhaps, an actress of any great range, but within the scope of what she does she has an easygoing, companionable manner, an unpretentious, goodhearted air of common sense that I find fairly irresistible. She has what used to be called a girl-next-door quality.

She’s also managed her career with remarkable shrewdness. The adult comedy We’re the Millers would probably be a very small blip on the summer movie radar if the movie’s trailer didn’t make it clear that Aniston performs a striptease. The scene in question is nothing especially eye-popping in itself—though Aniston, at 44 years, has every reason to feel confident with her clothes off—but there’s somehow an unearned pop-culture piquancy because it’s sweet little Rachel from Friends gyrating up there.

Aniston is the story about the film, but she isn’t the central character. That distinction belongs to the likable SNL veteran Jason Sudeikis as Dave, a scruffy, single, small-time weed dealer in Denver. Dave’s not a bad sort, but when he gets robbed of his stash and cash, and is forced to make a huge smuggling run to Mexico and back to make up the loss to his noxious boss (Ed Helms), he realizes that “disreputable loser” is written all over him, and that he’ll never get past the border guards alone.

His wacky solution is to enlist three neighbors from his building to masquerade as his square middle-class family, taking a trip south of the border in an RV the size of a small continent; he figures this hide-in-plain-sight cover will make him invisible to the authorities. So a neglected adolescent boy (the terrific Will Poulter) plays his good-hearted son, a guttersnipe runaway (Emma Roberts) plays his teenage daughter, and a broke, fed-up stripper (Aniston) poses as the little woman (a thieving boyfriend is used to explain how a stripper with no drug problem comes to be broke).

The plan works perfectly, and the trip goes smoothly. Just kidding. All manner of humiliating—and rather xenophobic—complications arise for the foulmouthed, sarcastic quartet, all in roughly the manner of The Hangover and its imitators. “The Millers” end up entangled with drug lords and DEA agents and crooked motorcycle cops; they’re pulled into other people’s marital frustrations. A tarantula crawls up a pantleg, resulting in a sight gag similar to a notorious one in 1998’s There’s Something About Mary.

It’s a sentimental comedy, of course—the four start to truly bond as a family through all of this and to look out for each other. Director Rawson Marshall Thurber gets the picture off to an excellent start, setting up the premise with admirable speed and efficiency. But the contrived, heavy-handed shtick slows it down as it progresses.

Still, the actors keep it from grinding to a halt. I thought there were plenty of laughs—mostly rising from the characterizations, not the coarse gags—even if the movie loses some energy in its second half. The four Millers really do seem to connect and learn to enjoy each other’s company. It’s soon easy to perceive affection just under the surface of their casual, almost reflexive exchange of obscenities and aspersions.

In this way, their behavior probably isn’t too different from most square middle-class families. They just think it is, because they’ve gotten their image of such families from movies and TV. But then, the makers of We’re the Millers have probably gotten their image of outcasts and misfits from the movies.

GREEN GEM

For those unfamiliar with The Lorax, the 1971 children’s book on which the new film Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax is based: It’s an environmentalist parable told by a mysterious character called The Once-ler. Once an industrialist, The Once-ler is now a recluse living in a wasteland of his own making. He & his family chopped down the entire forest of truffula trees, the tufts of which he used to make “thneeds,” a multi-use consumer product vaguely like a Snuggie.

Throughout the story, the Once-ler repeatedly ignores the warnings of The Lorax, a gnomic forest being who looks like a mustachioed orange throw-pillow & irritably advocates on behalf of the trees & the ecosystems they support, which include such cuties as Brown Bar-ba-loots & Swomee Swans. In the new, computer-animated film, he’s voiced by Danny DeVito, while Ed Helms speaks for the Once-ler.

Dr. Seuss, aka Ted Geisel, might be my pick for the finest narrative poet of the 20th Century, at least in English. His power comes not only from his exuberant, often nonsensical rhymes, but also from his rhythms—the lift & sweep & beauty of his cadences, & the thrilling declarative punch they give to his assertions: “‘Mister,’ he said with a sawdusty sneeze/‘I am The Lorax. I speak for the trees/I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues/And I’m asking you sir, at the top of my lungs…’”

Dr. Seuss was wise to make The Lorax a cantankerous, curmudgeonly sort; he knew that railing against consumerism is typically a loser’s game, & that those who speak for the trees tend to grow strident & tiresome, even though they may remain lovable. Conservative commentators have complained that The Lorax is environmentalist propaganda, which it certainly is, but it isn’t simpleminded propaganda.

The book may have depth, but what a movie needs is breadth. Like Dr. Seuss’ other books, The Lorax, very much by design, doesn't have it. So it fell to screenwriters Ken Daurio & Cinco Paul (Despicable Me) & directors Chris Renaud & Kyle Balda to stretch & embellish—to pad, in other words—the material to feature length.

Thus we get songs—pretty good ones—& an elaborate backstory set in Thneedville, an airtight plastic paradise in which all the trees & grass are artificial & in which fresh air is purchased from a villain named O’Hare (Rob Riggle). A boy named Ted (Zach Efron) wants to find a real tree to give to a girl he likes, Audrey (Taylor Swift); on the advice of his spirited Grandmother (Betty White) Ted becomes The Once-ler’s auditor.

Whether or not what I’ve just described can truly be called Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax, the movie is lively for kids & witty for adults. The trouble, of course, is that far more than the book, it’s an unabashed product of the very cultural mindset that it criticizes.

Toward the end, Ted, Audrey & the Grandmother race to plant the last truffula tree in the center of town, where everybody can see it, while the sinister O’Hare & his goons try to stop them. But in our world, there’s no shortage of public acknowledgments of the need for saner environmental policy, & in the movie, as in our world, there’s little sense of what the citizens of Thneedville (Thneedvillians?) would have to give up to make things better.

Obviously a fable for children can’t, & shouldn’t, attempt to account for all of these real-world complexities. But it shouldn’t be disingenuous about them, either. The screening I saw of Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax was held at a futuristic-looking multiplex at an enormous, brightly-colored outdoor shopping center that doesn’t look very different at all from Thneedville. Before it was a mall, it was a landfill site that had spent 20 years on the EPA’s Superfund list. Somewhere back there, before all us Once-lers arrived, it must have been pristine desert.