Manic Depression

Cold comfort: Diana Lee (Glenn Close) consoles daughter Isabel (Elizabeth Banks) in Heights. Photo K.C. Bailey. Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics.

There are a few too many rooftops in Heights. We get it already: looking down from a roof is also a way of keeping the world at a distance. And distance is the disease that a cluster of upper-crust New Yorkers attempt to let from their blood over one fraught 24-hour period in a Manhattan autumn. As a friend remarked, coming out of the theatre: “It’s Crash, but everybody’s white.”

Strutting in a strut-required knee-length leather jacket, Glenn Close plays Diana Lee, a famous actress starring in a new stage production of Macbeth that’s so well promoted, her face appears on the sides of buses, a space exactly the same size as her ego. Diana’s sensible daughter, Isabel (Elizabeth Banks), is exasperated, but knows that her mother’s meddling ways and flirtations with young men are just loneliness incarnate. To Diana, Isabel — who is about to marry Jonathan (James Marsden), a bland corporate lawyer — is safe, even dull. Still, mother and daughter love one another, even as they’re irritated to the point of storming apart on a crowded street.

That a person can feel and be more than one thing is a radical notion in Hollywood, and the complexity of these two women is a pleasant surprise in Heights, a movie as uneven as the Manhattan skyline it loves to a fault. The gorgeous young men who surround Diana and Isabel aren’t quite as fleshy as the women (though what flesh they do have is well sculpted); the men get to feel and be just one thing — stunned. Peter (John Light), a British journalist with a perpetually staggered expression, is doing a story for Vanity Fair on his tyrannical boyfriend, a Mapplethorpe-like photographer. Investigations into his lover’s ex-lovers push everyone in Heights toward the kind of we-are-all-linked collision that is a specialty of the movies.

Did somebody order a brooding young hunk with bad facial hair?: Jesse Bradford as Alec. Photo by Walter Thompson. Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics.

Alec (Jesse Bradford), a woeful struggling actor, also apparently stunned by something (perhaps the craft service on this film sucked; everyone appears to be nursing stomach pain), lives upstairs from Isabel and attracts the attention of diva Diana at an audition. Or maybe she was hitting on a different guy: dark, brooding Alec is almost interchangeable with Peter, Jonathan and a random ex-boyfriend of Isabel’s who works at the New York Times Magazine. It’s as if first-time director Chris Terrio was casting directly from Darren Star’s little black book. (Only Rufus Wainwright, as one of the exes, is a different kind of gorgeous; wryly Rufus and delightful.) Of course, being good-looking in the most conventional sense possible is not necessarily an impediment to a decent performance, but these young actors all emote a certain O.C.-level dullness. Elizabeth Banks is so forgettable that every time she came on screen, I thought she was someone new. Banks, like Bradford, seems to mistake somnambulism for depth.

Heights is the first Merchant-Ivory production to hit the screens since producer Ismail Merchant died in May (Terrio was once his assistant). Despite contemporary touches — split screens and gay themes — the film is, in a way, as chilly as Merchant-Ivory’s best-known costume dramas (A Room With a View, Howards End). For New Yorkers, these people sure are repressed. But their alienation belongs to a particular social milieu and their problems are those of a privileged, white and beautiful intelligentsia who reigned in the past. Replace cell phones with foot servants and Heights is a very Merchant-Ivory film after all.

So can we care about lucky, whining people? Can we care that Isabel is tortured because she turns down a fabulous foreign photography assignment to plan her wedding? (“There are string quartets!” she explains.) Well, yes, if the writing is strong enough, and it often is. Working from a play by Amy Fox, Terrio is capable of a light touch; Heights flutters where Crash crashed. Some lovely, thoughtful moments surround the speechifying about emptiness. Isabel has an altering encounter with a Welshman at a party (Andrew Howard, a mash-faced blond in a molting sweater, memorable if only for being physically distinguishable from all the other pin-ups); their first glances are a rousing mating dance. At a costume-fitting for a Fringe Festival show, Alec tries on a ridiculous “dragon wizard” hat. “Are you more dragon, or are you more wizard?” asks the fitter while Alec stares at his synthetic cone head in the mirror like he’s never sunk lower.

But decent writing can’t disguise mediocre acting, and Heights is a generational showdown between thespians. Sorry, kids, the grown-ups win. George Segal is sweet as a clueless rabbi and Isabella Rossellini is delicious as a nasty Vanity Fair editor. Eric Bogosian looks at ease playing Diana’s kindly director, and he’s not known for kindly. But Heights is really Glenn Close’s film. She makes Diana boozy and obnoxious and pained without ever hamming it up like Annette Bening in Being Julia. In a film about aborted human connections, Close forces us to feel for her. She takes up space not by being young and gorgeous, but by acting.

Heights opens July 8 in Toronto and Vancouver.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.