Landline (2017)
Directed by Gillian Robespierre
A teenager living with her sister and parents in Manhattan during the 1990s discovers that her father is having an affair.
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What critics compared Landline to
She’s bawdier, for sure; as she proved in her breakout feature, the 2014 rom-com “Obvious Child,” she utterly refuses to observe the traditional niceties, whether she’s making off-color jokes about abortion or airing dirty laundry in the most unsavory sense of that term.
If writer/director Gillian Robespierre’s comedy-drama Landline isn’t the instant masterwork her 2014 debut Obvious Child proved to be, that does not make it any less wondrously entertaining.
The followup to Obvious Child, director Robespierre’s 2014 “abortion comedy,” Landline comes equipped with a blue-chip cast: Edie Falco and John Turturro as the parents of two student-age daughters, played by Jenny Slate (from Obvious Child) and Abby Quinn, negotiating the hurly-burly of Manhattan life in 1995.
Gillian Robespierre’s latest lacks the advantage of an easy logline like that of her debut feature, Obvious Child.
In her second film with director Gillian Robespierre (the first was the underrated Obvious Child), Slate plays twentysomething Dana, a vaguely bored and slightly scatterbrained Gen-X Manhattanite working a nondescript job and living with her new fiancé and boyfriend Ben (Duplass) of many years, feeling a little stuck already in her young life.
They previously collaborated on Obvious Child , a movie that also mixed comedy and drama in an offbeat way.
Both films are distributed by Amazon Studios, which is demonstrating increasing savvy about how to pick ’em; Amazon’s 2016 summer releases included non-crowd-pleasers The Neon Demon and Wiener Dog, any random five minutes of which had more authentic shock value than the entirety of Landline.