Judie's story has more punch, in part because of the queasiness of seeing a settled, elderly woman do something we all did when younger — mistake friendly interest for sexual interest — but also because it contains Leiner's best moviemaking. He deftly establishes the set rhythms of Judie's daily life. Her husband watches TV, eats, and goes out onto the balcony for a smoke while she makes collages of pictures cut from magazines. (Dukakis' out-of-place, Old-World eyes show the banked frustration of a woman who has no one to talk to. As in Moonstruck, she's great at suggesting untapped intimacy.) Then when Judie has had her hopes dashed, we get the same shots of her husband's routine, but so brutally fast, the audience burst out laughing. I've never seen that kind of disappointment handled so purely cinematically, so alarmingly and yet amusingly, and in such a short amount of screen time. It may be on a modest scale but it's gem-grade filmmaking.
David and Allison's travails with Charlie (Bill Donner), their obese little goblin of a son, introduces a grotesque note to the naturalism. In one scene, Charlie's summer school principal (Stephen Colbert) repeats a racial epithet the boy has used and Allison has to ask what it means. The story thus takes what many parents must go through — watching the unexpected developments of their children and wondering, "Where did that come from?" — and pushes it a little further. You know Leiner is trying for a far-out comic effect because of the casting of Colbert, whose character says to David and Allison what they've been thinking but can't abide to hear spoken. When we see them alone again in their apartment, fucking like they used to, we don't know if what we're seeing is the result of a legal or a criminal solution, a flashback, or just a fantasy of an alternative, no-longer-possible life. There's something deliciously guilty about it, however, and I don't even have kids.
Emme's story is not grotesque but it is tinged with horror, as if you arrived at the end of your day and realized that you weren't dead but you were in hell. Gyllenhaal's Emme has a heart-shaped face and carries herself with an alluring slinkiness — she's the contemporary feline ideal of the young female urbanite on the make. She's also extremely brittle, managing three younger assistants while building a business that demands grueling self-promotion. She has the air and the control for it, but you can also see the toll it's taking in her eyes. In preparation for the birthday cake pitch, Emme engineers a meeting with the city's top pastry chef, Safarah Polsky (Edie Falco), who, she's heard, is presenting an opalescent ganache. What's interesting in their exchange is the two women are both velvety competitors and yet openly admit what a ridiculous game it is.
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