‘Matt and Mara’ Review: Will They or Won’t They? (original) (raw)
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Two former college friends reconnect for a possible romance in this irritatingly vague and vapid drama.
Matt Johnson and Deragh Campbell in “Matt and Mara.”Credit...Cinema Guild
Sept. 12, 2024
Matt and Mara
Directed by Kazik Radwanski
Drama
Not Rated
1h 20m
Whatever the bond between the title characters of “Matt and Mara” (Matt Johnson and Deragh Campbell), it’s an uncomfortable one. How could it be otherwise when one of them is constitutionally unable to recognize her needs and the other is clearly accustomed to satisfying his?
Either way, these two belong anywhere but together. He’s confident and pushy, a successful author whose recent collection of short stories has been widely praised. She’s pensive and cautious, a creative writing professor with a hot husband (Mounir Al Shami) and a small daughter, neither of whom seem of particular concern when Matt, a friend from college, shows up and elbows his way into her life and her classroom.
A nebulous bid to capture the tension between a seemingly cozy marriage and a romantic fling, and between the academy and the outside world, “Matt and Mara” is less a movie than an idea for one. It doesn’t help that neither character is likable, or that the director and writer, Kazik Radwanski, fills the screen with close-ups in lieu of information. Potentially shattering declarations are made and fade without remark, as when Mara announces to her husband, an experimental musician, and a group of their friends that music is essentially meaningless to her. What this says about her, or her marriage, we are left to guess.
Matt is similarly a cipher, though Mara’s skittishness makes him appear more bullying than besotted. There is something so deeply indistinct about these characters that their actions are often puzzling. One minute Mara seems repelled by Matt’s emotional directness, the next she’s erupting with jealousy when he has an innocent dinner with an acquaintance. Yet if she’s made of glass, as Matt claims at one point, then he’s made of rubber in a movie constructed almost entirely from thin air.
Matt and Mara
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters.
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