“The Oranges” is available on DVD/Blu-ray May 7th
“The Oranges” is one of those “slice of life” movies focused on a middle aged audience. You’ve seen it before with films like “Little Miss Sunshine” or, more recently, the Meryl Streep vehicle “It’s Complicated”. The formula is to get a group of talented actors together and illustrate the complexities of love and commitment and whatever while illustrating that sometimes it truly is complicated. While the talented cast portion of “The Oranges” is well covered, the movie falls short of revealing any sort of insight to the intricacies of love or life. In fact, the main conflict is just sort of creepy.
David (Hugh Laurie) and Terry (Oliver Platt) are best of friends. They live across the street from each other, share weekly family dinners every Saturday night and have helped raise each other’s children. They are both married to supportive women, Carol and Paige, (Alison Janney and Catherine Keener) who seem happy enough with the endless cycle of The Norm. David and Paige’s daughter Vanessa (Alia Shawkat) still lives at home and is all too aware of the rut that not only has engulfed her parents but is starting to sink its claws into her.
Then Nina (Leighton Meester whose real life father gets to be called Mr. Meester) arrives and sets the entire world on its head. Nina is Terry and Carol’s estranged daughter, an attractive woman in her mid-twenties who almost instantly starts sleeping with David. Boom. And now it’s complicated. (I would like to thank “It’s Complicated” for ruining these sorts of films for me. Every time another plot point gets revealed my internal monologue can do nothing but whisper in a sarcasm soaked voice “It really is Complicated”.)
Chaos ensues as the affair acts as a catalyst for some serious mid-life soul searching. My main issue with this wrinkle in the plot is that it is never really explored for the true issue that it is. I will not question or deny that people grow apart in their marriage and that sometimes it takes a stupid and drastic action to shake the foundation and get to the place in life where everyone is where they are supposed to be.
BUT the fact that David is having sex with a young girl that he has helped raise from an infant is ignored. This should not be ok and Hollywood Morals deem it fine. This is a fatal flaw in the film as the characters are not crafted good enough to ask or answer these issues. Because of this, “The Oranges” plays like an episode of some television drama you would find on ABC Family that just so happens to use a curse word every once in a while. All falls flat except for Oliver Platt. His performance is the one shining spot. The camera should have never left his side and left that silly business of sleeping with immature children alone.
