THE NEST
IFC Films
Reviewed for Shockya.com & BigAppleReviews.net linked from Rotten Tomatoes by: Harvey Karten
Director: Sean Durkin
Screenwriter: Sean Durkin
Cast: Jude Law, Carrie Coon, Charlie Shotwell, Oona Roche, Adeel Akhtar
Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 7/27/20
Opens: September 18, 2020
As Robert Burns noted, the best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley, which is a good thing if you’re a filmmaker because what can you write about if plans are always realized? Marriage supplies the best examples. Look at the 50% rate of divorce in America, the result of both declining novelty and huge expectations that go off the tracks. In his movie about a marriage that is not only deteriorating but features a woman whose own emotional balance goes off kilter, writer-director Sean Durkin is up his alley with his sophomore feature “The Nest.” His “Martha Marcy May Marlene” nine years back explores the life of a woman who had escaped from a cult, justifiably paranoid, trying to assimilate back with her natural family.
In his current film, Allison (Carrie Coon) is living comfortably in a New York suburb with her husband Rory O’Hara (Jude Law), her teen daughter Samantha (Oona Roche), and stepson Benjamin (Charlie Shotwell). Rory is a successful Wall Street trader; she gives horseback riding lessons at a nearby school. But Rory, dazzled by the American Dream, wants to become filthy rich not by continuing to have fantasies in America but by going to Britain where he must convince his old boss Arthur (Michael Culkin) to sell the firm to an American company.
Problems arise both at home and in the office. Allison complains that this would be their fourth move in ten years. The youngsters would have to make new friends and become adjusted to new schools. But in the 1980s when the story takes place, there may have been whiffs of feminism in the U.S. but there was nothing then like the current #MeToo movement, so Allison performs according to now-outdated gender roles. Even her mother (Wendy Crewson) advises that “a woman gets married so she doesn’t need to make decisions any more. Allison follows her man to England, where he has already paid a year’s rent on a 19th century Gothic house with farmland—so sure is he that his chickens will hatch notwithstanding the resistance he finds in his boss. Rory is British-born but his whose cultural ties to the mother country had lapsed after he had tasted success in a faster moving New York.
The movie is filled with shots of Allison riding her beloved horse Richmond around the large acreage while the principal riding done by her husband Rory is on the commuter train from their digs in Surrey to the London office. Puffed up with narcissism, Rory tries to pass himself off as a fellow with both money and class, bragging about the private schools the youngsters now attend (where Benjamin is bullied), passing himself off at fancy dinners with office staff as a person who attends theater and is impassioned by Anthony Hopkins. The brittleness of the marriage makes itself known when Rory is embarrassed by his disgusted wife, desperate because the family is down to its last 600 quid, announcing to the surprised restaurant table that her husband had never set foot in the theater and that he must have read his quote about Anthony Hopkins in that day’s newspaper.
A film that starts quietly albeit with music on the soundtrack that promises either horror or emotional surprises hits high melodramatic notes in the latter half, building up to a crescendo of family disfunction. A terrific performance by Jude Law is more than matched by that of Carrie Coon, as Allison cuts loose, no holds barred, furious that she went along with conservative gender roles. The death of her horse Richmond serves as apt metaphor for the inevitable demise of the O’Hara family.
107 minutes. © 2020 by Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online
Story – A-
Acting – A-
Technical – B+
Overall – A-