Bad Behavior

The purebred will win your admiration, but it's usually the mutt who captures your heart. No one will mistake this scruffy, ambling comedy from British director Blair (Leave to Remain, Number One) for the elegant pedigreed efforts of Merchant, Ivory, and Jhabvala (not to take anything away from such works, which I adore). Bad Behavior has no star power, no sumptuous detail; it doesn't even have much in the way of drama. A bathroom gets renovated, a woman who left writing behind when she became a mother returns to the typewriter, a flirtation takes place at an office copier. But then, that's what makes the film so unassumingly attractive and appealing and, ultimately, affecting; it is about the common cares -- some of them mundane, others less so -- which fill up most of our lives and treats them with such care and compassion that we feel our own low existences elevated in the process. When Blair's camera dwells on the face of of Ellie (Cusack), a woman balancing motherhood and a bookstore job and no longer fulfilled by either, who feels more and more distance from her Irish homeland, from the writer she aspired to be, and from her husband Gerry (Rea), a droll bureaucrat in London's city planning office whom she still loves very much, we're given the time to watch wave after wave of subtle, conflicting feeling wash over her face and to discover how troubling and complex and touching the struggles of an “ordinary” life can be. Virtually every scene is a small wonder of comic delight or poignancy, and the idea that the film was largely improvised is amazing. Its many joys include Rea, whose hangdog look gets a droopy workout -- gravity appears to be pulling at the edges of his face more profoundly than at any other human's; Daniels as the Nunn brothers, the identical twin contractors who fix up Ellie and Gerry's bathroom; Todd's Sophie, Gerry's co-worker who is attracted to him; and of course, the astonishing Cusack, whose complicated blend of fondness and irritation toward Gerry is one of the truest expressions of married love I've ever seen. The look of Bad Behavior courts shabbiness, the film wanders, and its end is modest, but the way it reveals life measured out in coffee spoons and epiphanies found in sugar bowls is rare and sweet.