Neither filmdom’s most vibrant actress over 70 nor one of its very brightest young screen presences comes close to saving the clueless and cliched ode to hippie culture, Peace, Love and Misunderstanding.
The ageless Jane Fonda, now 74, and the wondrous Elizabeth Olsen (Martha, Marcy, May, Marlene) burrow through a screenplay fraught with silliness. Fonda, still lovely and a smart comedienne, wisely seems bemused. Catherine Keener’s along for the ride as the conservative daughter of Fonda, a pot-smoking Woodstock resident and protest marcher.
While Keener’s duet with Jeffrey Dean Morgan of The Band’s The Weight may not exactly have recently departed Levon Helm rolling in his grave, it comes close. Also conjured up are Jimi Hendrix, whose live Star Spangled Banner at the original Woodstock Fonda claims was the “soundtrack” while her water broke giving birth to Keener. Olsen and brother Nat Wolff (The Naked Brothers Band) get involved with Woodstock kids after their mom drags them to grandmother’s for a visit. Hers is particularly vexing at first since Olsen’s a vegetarian, animal-rights gal and her new flames’s a stinking butcher.
Fonda not only smokes pot, she deals it, whereas the screenplay merely gradually grows mold. Fonda also sculpts and likes to paint nude men, who drop their drawers without regard for sagging flesh or grandkids in the room. It may be the peace protests that seem the most community-theater-in-the-slow-season, though. They’re both sub-TV movie and sub-TV commercial painful.
Wolff, constantly filming on a camcorder throughout, sums up the proceedings with a climactic public showing of his film (a much better one than throne he’s in) but not before Peace, Love and Misunderstanding meticulously manages to trash the legacy of a culture once known for its life-giving energy and artistic highs. Here the music even stinks, and if it’s supposed to be moving that grandmom has plenty of free-spirit to spread around to uptight children and grandchildren, at least give us something besides Fonda and Rosanna Arquette sitting around a campfire with a gang of women ostensibly doing some kind of female energy rite, while actually merely evoking the likes of Fonda’s, “I once had a threesome with Leonard Cohen.” Though it’s tempting to wonder how the still’alive Cohen feels about that, I merely cringed. First time screenwriters Christina Mengert and Joseph Muszynski at least have a semblance of an excuse. For veteran director Bruce Beresford, I can only say, watching this film (despite a glowing Fonda and Olsen) made me feel, to quote Helm, “about half past dead.”
4 Remembrances of Things Ghast(ly) (Out of 10)
Peace, Love, and Misunderstanding is open now at the Ritz Bourse in Philadelphia