PARK CITY — Deeply unpleasant to watch with little edification to offer in compensation, Dan Mirvish‘s Between Us invites viewers to spend two evenings with a pair of married couples whose relationships are, to put it mildly, in jeopardy. The Slamdance co-founder presumably didn’t need a quartet of established thesps to get his film on the schedule here, but those names — especially that of Julia Stiles — will be crucial in getting this film seen by anyone outside of Park City.
Stiles and Taye Diggs play Grace and Carlo, relative newlyweds struggling to maintain a bohemian existence in Manhattan. In the first of the film’s two encounters, they’ve gone to visit the Midwest home of Carlo’s old schoolmate Joel (David Harbour) and his wife Sharyl (Melissa George). This reunion is intercut with a New York-set visit, a year or two later, whose icy start suggests just how badly the first evening will go.
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Tables have turned in the later setting, with the Midwesterners enjoying almost sickeningly rejuvenated love while money worries (and the baby they’d never expected to have) have the New Yorkers at each other’s throats.
If that sounds like tidy symmetry, we’ve hardly even started. Mirvish and Joe Hortua‘s script (adapting Hortua’s play) reads like something crafted to keep each cast member equally engaged: Like a Musical Chairs of annoyance, characters trade off their bad behavior. One is drunkenly sarcastic while others make peace, another gets bitchy while her husband struggles for dignity. The characters’ sometimes unconvincing mood swings aren’t helped by regular breaks for what must have been spotlight monologues onstage and have here become storytelling flashbacks — scenes whose potential to shed light on the characters’ psyches is undercut by their obviousness as dramatic devices.
Production Company: Bugeater Filmed Entertainment
Cast: Julia Stiles, Melissa George, Taye Diggs, David Harbour
Director: Dan Mirvish
Screenwriters: Joe Hortua, Dan Mirvish, based on the play by Joe Hortua
Producers: Dan Mirvish, Hans Ritter, Mike S. Ryan
Executive producers: Brent Stiefel, Dana Altman, Barry Hennessey, Elana Krausz, Christo Dimassis, Victoria Guenier
Director of photography: Nancy Schreiber
Production designer: Tracey Gallagher
Music: Tobias Enhus, H. Scott Salinas
Costume designer: Tracey Moulton
Editor: Dean Gonzalez
Sales: Peter Trinh, ICM
No rating, 90 minutes
