Cheap The Moderns (DVD) (Keith Carradine, Linda Fiorentino) (Alan Rudolph) Price

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Customer Reviews of The Moderns

The Next-To-The-Last really good Alan Rudolph movie....
Between 15-18 years ago, filmmaker Alan Rudolph, a protege of Robert Altman's, came out with a trio of really excellent films that captured the feeling of the times and places they were set in beautifully. The first was "Choose Me", a story about singles in the tail end of the disco era and the effect casual sex has on its characters; "Trouble In Mind", to this day, the ONLY film that attempts to capture the bizarre zeitgeist of the early eighties and the late seventies, a time that every person over 30 has lived through cognitively, but no other filmmaker sought to fictionalize....

Then there was "The Moderns": A movie so thick with atmosphere, good acting and mood that you'll be hard pressed to find something to compare it with. The story centers around unemployed artist Nick Hart, (Keith Carradine, the star of Rudolph's other two masterpieces,) dealing with the sudden appearance back in his life of Rachel, a woman who blows hot and cold, and who just happens to be his peripatetic wife from an earlier life. The odd thing is, she's ALSO the wife of a shallow, materialistic so and so named Bert Stone, a "little man" who made his fortune in prophylactics. These parts are played by Linda Fiorentino and John Lone....Lone being a truly quirky bit of casting.

Despite her long absence from his life and Stone's presence, they rekindle their old relationship under Stone's nose, although he obviously suspects something from the beginning.

Set in Paris in the 20's, Hart and his fellow characters are pictured as having a peripheral connection with Gertrude Stein's inner circle, a circle that includes Ernest Hemingway. This is where the atmosphere comes in, along with excellent music, as Rudolph recreates the period and setting near-perfectly, allowing his actors to reveal the mechanics of bohemian relationships, circa 1925 or so...

In true Altman/Rudolph fashion, the ensemble cast's the thing, as every character seems to get equal screen time. Geraldine Chaplin has a turn here as one of Hart's paramours and sponsors and Genevieve Bujold is a cagy art dealer Hart has business with. Wallace Shawn also has a part as a "passing scene" columnist for a Parisian newspaper who contemplates suicide.

Rudolph pays attention to every tiny detail, and has his American characters speaking English in interplay with each other and his French characters speaking French. Bujold speaks a form of "esperanto" that includes BOTH languages throughout the film.

Can't afford that ticket to La Belle France? Rent this movie, break out the brie, boules and chablis and enjoy this substantial, quirky movie!

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Fun Film!
This an entertaining, unassuming film, set in Paris of the 1920s. I have always liked films set around this time because they are fun in terms of their music, the style of dress, and their mood. This film loosely follows a struggling young artist (is there any other kind?) as he works on his craft in Paris. Along the way, you have great costumes and great tunes. I love the theme song played at the beginning of the film as well as that short "Da-Da" piece played in the middle. Linda Fiorentino supplies the flapper beauty and oh boy is she pretty! There are some historical figures that pop up in this movie, like a young Hemingway casting about in Paris, and they help to add to the flavour of the film. If you like films such as "Henry and June" or Jennifer Jason Leigh's Dorothy Parker film from the 1990s, then you should give this DVD a spin. You might enjoy it!

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The little things
I would give this movie five stars for myself, but objectively I recomend it at four. The other reviews do a good job of summing up. I just wanted to add that if your a fan of little touches and subtle humour, this is one of the greats. Hemmingway played more as the kind the drunken writer you might actually meet in real life, constantly giving out philosophy and observations in an un-solicited manner, obsessed with fair play (see the boxing match). Two American tourists in the cafe getting their literary facts wrong in the begining of the movie. An oil painting bobbing up and down as the background of a scene in a moving car... Hope I'm not giving away too much, but the little touches are part of why this is such a fun movie. If your into art, literature and the romantism of the twenties, but can still laugh at it and yourself, this is a great film.