Saw this movie in its opening weekend. The Rachels (McAdams and Weisz) have come a long way since Red Eye (2005) and Oz the Great and Terrible (2013). McAdams was in Red Eye, saw this twice in the same opening week when I was 15, because my mom wanted to go and I love my mom. I sat through the second half of Oz in a hotel room last weekend while trying to avoid chaperoning a high school debate conference for several hours. I only mention this to establish my bona fides. I’m one of the 15 people who saw Aloha (2015) and didn’t have a seizure, so I feel like I can speak from, what my mom would call, “a place of love” about Disobedience.
As an aside, I feel like it’s important to mention that Rachel McAdams is NOT Amy Adams who is NOT Isla Fisher. I had an incredibly hard time telling the difference between these three actors for many years until director Tom Ford leaned hard into the twin thing in Nocturnal Animals (2016) and cast Isla Fisher as the fictional stand-in for Amy Adams’s character. Or maybe he cast Rachel McAdams? I’m not 100% on this. I know that Anne Hathaway doesn’t look like any of these actors, but I sometimes mix her up in my head, because I feel like two of these people were really popular in Disney-adjacent movies when I was a kid. None of these people is Bryce Dallas Howard, by the way (lady from new Jurassic Park and that one episode of Black Mirror, Season 3), who is sometimes confused with Jessica Chastain.
I did my due diligence last year as a member of the viewing public by dutifully ignoring the presumably charming romantic dramedy Menashe, and Richard Gere’s momentary lapse of judgment Norman, and I kept telling myself I would see Foxtrot (2017), but then, honestly, it got away from me and no one would go with me and so here we are in 2018 in the next golden age of Jewish cinema and I’m stoked. Besides Denial (2016), where a professor earnestly curb stomps a holocaust denier in order to alleviate our collective regret about electing Trump to office, and my half-hearted viewing of the aforementioned Oz, I hadn’t seen Weisz in a while. It was nice. I heard good things about My Cousin Rachel (2017), good things. Went in with low expectations.
I was generally pleased with the gentleness of the best friend-husband character (David). Even when he’s fighting, he sounds like he’s whispering. The way he curls his fingers around the Rachels’ personal bubbles is really tender and intimate and lovely. His speech to the congregation at temple was a nice flourish, and that’s about it.
Wife had much stronger feelings about the movie when we left, so I think it’s best just to insert her sick burns into the end of this review:
-Bet it was the director’s idea to have that snowball spit-kiss.
-Movie should have been called Indecision. I can only imagine the feeling I have now having seen that movie is how you feel when I’m getting dressed in the morning.
-Would’ve made for a solid hour-ten movie (ran nearly 2).
Overall, kind of felt the way I did about Atomic Blonde (2017) and the way I think a lot of people went into Red Sparrow (2018) before realizing it was an ok spy-thriller: price of admission is really the torrid kissing scene. But then you have to think more about that phrase “price of admission” and how MoviePass has changed the meaning of that term. If you’re not into The Mummy or Isla Fisher playing Jewish Blue is the Warmest Color, this is probably not the movie for you or for my wife.
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