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Funny And Genuine 'Landline' Is '90s Nostalgia With Heart
By
Rain Jokinen
Published Jul 20, 2017
Modified Jul 20, 2017
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By
Rain Jokinen
Published Jul 20, 2017
Modified Jul 20, 2017
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In 2014, director Gillian Robespierre and actress and comedian Jenny Slate teamed up for the delightful abortion comedy, Obvious Child. And while that might not be the most accurate description of the film, it's the one that stuck, since it centers on a young comedian who finds herself with an unwanted pregnancy, chooses to end it, and isn't punished for that decision in any way. But that was just plot. Where the film excelled was in its realism and Slate's breezy and natural performance.
Robespierre and Slate have teamed up again for the comedy Landline, set in 1995 New York. At first, the film's period setting doesn't seem like it's important enough to include. Robespierre co-wrote the screenplay with Elisabeth Holm, and they clearly have included their personal experiences and love or 90's music into the film. But as the film progresses, its '90s setting serves a clever purpose.
Jenny Slate is Dana Jacobs, the older of two sisters living with their parents in a NYC apartment. She's engaged to be married to Ben (Jay Duplass), but is having doubts about the decision, especially after running into former college fling Nate (Finn Wittrock) at a party, hence her decision to move back home for a while.
Meanwhile, younger sister Ali (Abby Quinn) is still in high school, and walking the line between responsible good girl, and young adult wanting to try the edgier things in life, like sex and drugs and rock n' roll (or at least techno n' raves).
Their parents, Pat (Edie Falco) and Alan (John Turturro), have reached the point in their marriage where they're more comfortable expressing their disgust with each other than displaying love, so it's not exactly surprising when Ali discovers love letters her father, an aspiring playwright, has been writing to another woman.
The sisters have a love/hate bond with each other, which is not that unusual when it comes to siblings, but the film does a great job of illustrating that kind of relationship, especially how you can still love someone who annoys the living crap out of you. Slate and Quinn have such amazing sisterly chemistry that I was fully expecting to learn they are actually related in real life. (They aren't.)
The 1995 setting is convincing, but never feels obvious. In many ways, the sisters aren't dressed that differently from millennials today (the 90s are in!), and Dana has a design job that could probably exist now, except that it's for a print magazine. It's in personal communication that the limitations of the decade are best illustrated. There's no social media. Emails are printed out on dot matrix printers. When Dana wants to check her messages, she's always mere steps away from a street pay phone where she can call her answering machine.
It's easy to forget that in the dark ages of the 1990s, if you decided you didn't want to talk to someone for a while, you could really and truly just drop out of contact. They'd have no way of keeping tabs on you — no Facebook updates to monitor; no Instagram stories to stalk.
But the film also beautifully illustrates how those limitations actually aided in real communication. When the fractured Jacobs family does talk to each other, they tend to let it all spill out, since they don't have that technological barrier that, these days, allows us to get away with barely saying anything at all when we're typing away on our smart phones. Landline is funny, true to life, and, at times, heartbreaking. But the real surprise is it managed to do something I never thought possible: make me feel nostalgic for the '90's.
Tagged
edie falco
finn whitrock
jay duplass
jenny slate
john turturro
landline
original
Rain Jokinen
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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