The Other Woman: Natalie Portman Is a Homewrecker
Here's a trailer for the Don Roos film The Other Woman, a drama filmed two years ago that's just now getting a small release, possibly now that Natalie Portman is the movie star of the moment. It looks good?
Well sure the trailer is a little sappy, but Don Roos is a maker of interesting films, so there's promise there. While his 1998 The Opposite of Sex now seems a bit shameless and tacky in the post-indie boom years, 2005's strange and beguiling Happy Endings was one of that year's most criminally overlooked movies. It featured sparklingly good performances from Lisa Kudrow (a Roos favorite, also in this film), Maggie Gyllenhaal, and, of all people, Tom Arnold. That movie dealt partly with a baby gone into the abstract — given up for adoption years ago — and The Other Woman places that theme front and center, this time with a SIDS death and the struggle to overcome, etc. Natalie Portman plays a good homewrecker, who marries the married man she's been sleeping with and tries to be a good stepmother to his young son. Lisa Kudrow plays the jilted wife, and the all too absent of late Lauren Ambrose pops up as a friend.
The movie is based on the 2006 novel Love and Other Impossible Pursuits by Ayelet Waldman (sometimes known as Michael Chabon's wife) and comes with an interesting media angle — Waldman wrote the novel partly in response to an internet uproar, mostly on the blog UrbanBaby, that arose after Waldman said in an interview that she loves her husband more than her kids. So the novel is largely about wealthy urban motherhood and the expectations and scrutiny placed on that endeavor. If the film tackles that issue and not just the dead baby tragic stuff, it could be fairly interesting.
Or, you know, who cares. Natalie Portman is so pretty, isn't she? Let's just look at her for a while.
