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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

Landline is worth picking up

LANDLINE (Gillian Robespierre). 97 minutes. Opens Friday (August 4). See listing. Rating: NNN


Three years after their terrific dramedy Obvious Child, director Gillian Robespierre and star Jenny Slate reunite for a gentler project that doesn’t quite match the spirit of its predecessor. 

Landline is set in New York over the fall of 1995, before cell phones and the rise of the web. It was a time when total privacy was still a possibility, and no one had to maintain an online presence. 

Total privacy is something that’s awfully appealing to Dana (Slate), a layout artist at Paper Magazine. Freaking out about spending the rest of her life with her pleasant but passive live-in boyfriend Ben (Jay Duplass), she moves back home to give herself some space and think things through – and winds up destabilizing the lives of her parents (Edie Falco, John Turturro) and teenage sister (Abby Quinn).

Much of Landline feels like any American indie from the golden age of Miramax – there are a lot of scenes in record stores and restaurants – and the familiarity of its storyline can work against it. If you’ve ever seen a Woody Allen movie, or a Nicole Holofcener movie, or just about anything Hope Davis made during the Clinton administration, you won’t be surprised by a single plot point here. 

While the ground may be familiar, the performances are lively and engaging. Slate and Quinn are terrific as very different sisters, and Turturro and Falco make their supporting roles feel just as important, and as inhabited, as the leads’. (Duplass fades into the background for most of the picture, but he delivers when it counts.) 

So, no, it’s nothing new. But it’s pretty watchable all the same.

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