IF I WERE YOU (Joan Carr-Wiggin). 115 minutes. Opens Friday (November 29). For venues and times, see listings. Rating: NN
Slogging through this well-intentioned, droopily paced, tonally incoherent, Toronto-set farce about infidelity, friendship and self-actualization, you’re struck again and again by the fact that Marcia Gay Harden is a versatile, inventive and woefully underused actor.
As Madelyn, a woman who discovers her husband is cheating on her and, within minutes, strikes up a duplicitous alliance with his mistress (Talk To Her’s Leonor Watling), Harden exhibits superb comic timing and a knack for translating her character’s desires and anxieties into physical activity. Watch the way she manically gobbles grapes in a slapstick suicide intervention scene.
Unfortunately, her fine work is at the mercy of a baggy script fraught with mostly cartoonish supporting characters and zany developments that are neither convincing nor amusing, as well as a bafflingly plodding editing pattern. Nearly every scene seems to end long before director Joan Carr-Wiggin and editor Elizabeth Cotter finally decide to cut away.
At least Aidan Quinn turns up to play a small but pivotal role. The scene in which he and Harden discuss their relationships with their dead parents is easily the best thing in the movie. Two strong actors engaged in a relaxed, emotionally resonant conversation: an oasis of heart and wit in a desert of strained comedy.
