Taglines: It’s never too late to change.
“Every Day,” starring Liev Schreiber and Helen Hunt, is an intimate, often uncomfortable, sometimes whimsical look at a sandwich marriage — those midlife couples caught between growing kids and aging parents with no time for themselves. So a comedy of manners this is not.
Instead writer-director Richard Levine ( “Nip/Tuck”) is concerned with lives derailed by ordinary events. Schreiber’s Ned is the center of this crumbling universe and the one being buried by the weight of his world. His teenage son (Ezra Miller) is gay and just finding his footing, at the same time his ailing father-in-law ( Brian Dennehy) is moving in and his frustrated wife (Hunt) is barely coping. Ned also is dealing with a juicy co-worker ( Carla Gugino) who is flirting and a crazy boss ( Eddie Izzard) who’s never satisfied.
What makes this intriguing, yet woefully uneven film so relatable is that there is nothing about Ned’s experience that seems extreme. Thoreau’s “lives of quiet desperation” line comes to mind.
The unraveling officially begins with the arrival of Dennehy’s Ernie, a big man, now wheelchair bound, irascible and still at odds with his daughter, Hunt’s careworn Jeannie. To make room for Ernie, 14-year-old Jonah (affectingly played by Miller) and younger brother Ethan (Skyler Fortgang) are forced to bunk together. But that is just what starts the deep ripple effect of his arrival.
Levine begins teasing out the existing strains of the relationships, using that to propel the action. Set in New York with Ned split between work in the city and life in the burbs, cinematographer Nancy Schreiber (“Your Friends & Neighbors,” “Serious Moonlight”) intensifies the distance between them — moving in close to capture the claustrophobia at home, and pulling back to create space and breathing room at work, with Ned awash in open space as things heat up with Robin (Gugino).
Every Day
Directed by: Richard Levine
Starring: Carla Gugino, Liev Schreiber, Helen Hunt, Brian Dennehy, Eddie Izzard, Ezra Miller, Skyler Fortgang, Cassidy Gard, Bianca Giancoli
Screenplay by: Richard Levine
Production Design by: Adam Stockhausen
Cinematography by: Nancy Schreiber
Film Editing by: Pam Wise
Costume Design by: Ane Crabtree
Set Decoration by: Kate Foster
Art Direction by: Brianne Zulauf
Music by: Jeanine Tesori
MPAA Rating: R for language, sexual content and some drug use.
Studio: Ambush Entertainment
Release Date: January 14, 2011
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