After a quarter of a century playing and burnishing their artistry together, the renowned New York Fugue String Quartet faces an impending shakedown after its senior cellist Peter Mitchell (Walken) is diagnosed with early symptoms of Parkinson’s disease and decides to bow out.
The quartet’s self-sufficient homeostasis starts to crack, violist Juliette Gelbart (Keener) who always regards Peter as a father figure, has a difficult time to come to terms with the news, and her husband Robert (Hoffman), the second violinist, seizes this as an opportunity to suggest that after the quartet’s re-grouping, he wishes to alternate the role of the first violinist role with the current one Daniel Lerner (Ivanir), which a perfectionist Daniel demurs.
Misery loves company, where there are professional dissensions, there are also inapt personal mishaps, miffed after finding out Juliette doesn’t stand by him of his said suggestion and feeling her emotional aloofness hurtful, Robert inanely sleeps with dancer Pilar (Charhi), and more inanely, his one-night-stand is discovered by a sharp-minded Juliette the morning after, ergo their marriage is teetering on the rocks. What’s adding insult to injury is that Daniel irrevocably gets besotted with Alexandra (Poots), Juliette and Robert’s daughter, also a violinist in training, he has to brazen it out as if it is not an entirely improper act at that moment and Alexandra must be the one to be answer for initiating this cradle-snatching romance (and blessedly, to end it as well). The whole enchilada ticks all the boxes of a middle-class ethical drama with fusillades of platitudinous dialogues and incidents, veiled with a faintly self-absorbed narcissism.
However, the quintet of main performers (Poots included, shedding light on the crux of a perfect quartet) largely countervails the first-time filmmaker Yaron Zilberman’s greenness with eloquence and devotion. Catherine Keener holds it on her own with a steely combo of detachment and vulnerability when the world around her starts crumbling down, among the quartet, she is the only one who is passively buffeted by the negative tidings one after another, maybe because of her sex, in conjunction with a key mother-daughter confrontation (with both her parents are professional musicians on tour, it is somehow unfair for Alexandra only tees off on her mother for bad parenting), Zilberman’s slant of a woman with a profession seems to be still in thrall of regressive sexist prejudice. Among the stronger sex, both Hoffman and Ivanir are somehow mired in their characters’ insensible weakness, thus it is up to a sangfroid-retaining Walken to stand out as Peter has a more life-threatening condition to grapple with and he comport himself as the epitome of a venerated muso who is capable of conducting his exit with dignity intact and ego unruffled, not to mention he becomes the catalysis that eventually helps the quartet regain its life force after the internecine snafu.
By and large, A LATE QUARTET is a philharmonic drawing-room drama wreathed with classical music intoxication (the central piece is Beethoven’s Op. 131), which is performed with virtuosity by Brentano String Quartet, and surely art-savvy audience will dig in, but chances are they might also feel a tad disappointed by the discrepancy between itshigh-brow milieu andmiddle-brow execution.
referential entries: Dustin Hoffman’s QUARTET (2012, 6.0/10); Joel Hopkins’ LAST CHANCE HARVEY (2008, 6.8/10).
