Last Week's Guilty Pleasure

... was Heights, a movie that I probably shouldn’t have enjoyed, but did. The movie follows 24 hours in the life of a middle-aged Broadway actress, played by Glenn Close, who is the hostess at a party even as she reflects on her vanished youth, in the latest version of the Virginia Woolf situation via Michael Cunningham and Meryl Streep. It is also a bit of a satire on the lives of intellectuals and aesthetes, although the characters are sympathetic enough that the satire doesn’t bite too hard. The guests at the party discuss their ongoing projects, such as "Ingmar Bergman’s Persona as a musical." Or: "A movie about people dying, except it’s funny because of the Australian accents." (Is this really what it’s like to be an artist or writer in New York? It looks so much fun!)

The central emotional conflict in the movie is between Close and her daughter, Isabel (Elizabeth Banks), who contemplates leaving her handsome, wealthy fiance so she can travel the world and take photographs. She has a series of encounters with people who try to convince her to abandon her sheltered, privileged upbringing and become more genuine, so to speak. There is a scene where she is mocked for her name, roughly as follows: "Isabel? Let me guess who you were named after: Isabel Archer? Your mother must have found it so precious to name you after a literary character!" But my favorite part of the movie is when she half-falls in love with a man at the party from Wales. How often do we get to hear a Welsh accent in movies? Not often, in my case.