Heights
Some movies grow in your mind after you see them. "Heights" is a rarer animal -- a film that does a slow and stately fade. A week after seeing this multi-character Manhattan roundelay, you may barely remember its small, not particularly original ironies. Yet it's wholly alive while it's up there on the screen, in a way few movies are anymore.
The action takes place amid the haunts of the artistic elite -- Woody Allen-land, minus the dithering. Diana Lee (Glenn Close) is the hub around which the movie's many spokes revolve: a legendary actress who has conquered Hollywood (and has the Oscar to prove it) but who is New York to the bone. She's in rehearsals to play Lady Macbeth on Broadway, and in the master class that opens "Heights" she can be seen exhorting her students to be consumed with passion, for God's sake.
Diana may be a fascinating person to meet at a party, but as a mother she's a full-time job. Not surprisingly, her daughter Isabel (Elizabeth Banks) is a wishy-washy thing, strikingly beautiful but lacking her mother's flair for the grand gesture. A commercial photographer, Isabel is engaged to ad exec Jonathan (James Marsden, of "X-Men") and spends the first few scenes trying to keep the upcoming wedding from turning into a production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," starring Diana Lee.
Out of the blue appears an old boyfriend (Matt Davis) offering Isabel the photojournalism job of a lifetime if she postpones the nuptials. Jonathan, meanwhile, is quietly undergoing a crisis of his own, and the couple's unsteady relationship is evoked by the walkie-talkies they carry instead of cellphones, connecting them (and only them) while keeping each other at arm's length.
A parallel storyline follows Peter (John Light), a British journalist commissioned to write a Vanity Fair article about a world-famous art photographer named Benjamin Stone. Peter's an ex-boyfriend of his subject and, far from causing ethical problems, his job is to find and interview the many, many ex-lovers whose images make up Stone's latest exhibition. The photographer has even supplied a list and written catty comments in the margins.
We never see Stone in the film, which is just as well, since Diana sucks the oxygen out of every scene she's in. Two charismatic need-freaks and the film might turn into an Upper East Side remake of "Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster." "Heights" says that the world has its natural stars and the rest of us toil in their shadows, happy to be manipulated, resenting every second of it, and occasionally reclaiming a foot or two of psychic territory.
There are lesser stars in life, of course, supporting players who chafe at the lack of recognition. Jonathan's acid-tongued co-worker (Tom Lennon) is one, as is Peter's Vanity Fair editor, an airy, imperious sprite played by Isabella Rossellini. The singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright pops up as one of Stone's exes, dripping with heavy-lidded cynicism and swiping whole chunks of the movie. A visiting Welshman (Andrew Howard) Isabel meets at a party is another one of these casual live wires; like Diana, sexy with certainty but, unlike her, uninterested in keeping up appearances.
Everyone in New York is ready to drop and do Diana's bidding except her immediate family, and Close conveys the headstrong annoyance and panic of a woman who has to be onstage and down center every waking moment. There's a lot of Margo Channing in "All About Eve" to her -- she even snaps and calls someone "a [expletive] Eve Harrington" at one point.
"Heights" has been adapted by Amy Fox from her own play, and it marks the first-time direction of Chris Terrio, a protégé of the late Ismail Merchant (who co-produced). There's nothing especially cinematic about it -- no show-off camerawork or snazzy editing. A few split-screen shots are the only affectation, and that's more traffic management than anything else. Yet the film is engrossing in a way that "Crash," a structurally similar but more ambitious affair, never manages. For one thing, Terrio seems genuinely interested in what his characters have to say, whereas the people in "Crash" rarely rise above what they stand for.
Not all of "Heights" works. A subplot about an actor neighbor (Jesse Bradford) of Isabel and Jonathan's is underdeveloped and simplistic, and I'm not sure Banks understands that it's her character's normality, even dullness, that's her saving grace (it drives her mother batty). The one scene in which Fox and Terrio attempt to address race is well intentioned but condescending; like Isabel, they've strayed outside their neighborhood. But then someone like George Segal will turn up as a wedding rabbi, grinning like a Borscht Belt tummler and cutting to the heart of the matter, and all is forgiven. "Heights" breathes, is briefly and immediately present, and is over. In this summer of noisy steroid cinema, such small favors are welcome.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
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