‘For Worse’ Review: Amy Landecker Struggles to Make Sparks Fly in Her Directorial Debut
- "For Worse" features a charming scene between Lauren and Dave that showcases immediate chemistry, but the film overall lacks the spark needed to make it truly engaging.
In perhaps the single most charming scene of For Worse , Lauren (Amy Landecker) shares a cigarette with Dave (Bradley Whitford). The characters are near strangers, tossed together by weird and annoying circumstances. But in that moment, their chemistry feels immediate, loose with warmth and crackling with possibility. It just feels right to see them together; this is the kind of connection rom-coms are built around.
Unfortunately, it comes late enough into the 90-minute movie that when it does arrive, you're left to wonder why the preceding hour-plus hasn't had more of this spark. For Worse isn't all bad; bits of it are intriguing and the rest is too anodyne to get worked up about. But it's hard to shake the disappointment that this is just an okay movie, when it seems like it should've been a good one.
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Though Landecker has previously established herself as a scene-stealer in works ranging from the Coens' A Serious Man to Amazon's Transparent , the lead role she's crafted for herself in her writing and directing debut is not one of her richer ones. Her Lauren is sympathetic enough. We find her finalizing her divorce from Chase (Paul Adelstein), both halves of the former couple emanating more exhaustion than rancor. But even a split that's been a long time coming can be devastating to the people forced to rebuild their lives in its wake.
In a minor act of indulgence, Lauren signs herself up for a commercials acting class overseen by the prickly and imperious Liz (Gaby Hoffmann, one of many faces familiar from Transparent ). That small rebellion becomes a bigger one when the course introduces her to a pack of younger friends, including 20something hunk Sean (Nico Hiraga). Despite Landecker and Hiraga demonstrating no real spark, their characters are attracted to each other from the minute they lock eyes, and they strike up a halting flirtation that carries on all the way up to the Palm Springs wedding of another classmate, Kiersey Clemons' Maria.
Say this for For Worse : Of all the older woman/younger man pairings we've seen lately, few have been as candid as this one about the unglamorous realities of postmenopausal bodies. Lauren and Sean's first real hookup is cut short by a bodily fluid mishap that Lauren explains to Sean as "a thing that happens after you have a baby"; though she's mortified enough to flee, he seems to take it in stride. Another, later plot development invokes vaginal dryness, though Lauren is quick to confirm she has not personally struggled with that issue. If this movie plays some small part in destigmatizing middle-aged female sexuality, that's worth applauding.
I'll also acknowledge that For Worse 's choice to make Lauren and her classmates aspirants in "what many consider to be the most low-rent form of acting there is, the television commercial," as Liz puts it (rather than more traditional fields like theater or film), is a fun one. It's too bad that most of the film sidelines this subplot to the point that the biggest developments occur offscreen, rather than go the In a World … route of showing us around this niche corner of the entertainment industry.
But beyond those occasional dashes of inspiration, For Worse is a curiously tepid affair, uninterested in building out the world around Lauren or even in going that deep into Lauren's feelings. The former is understandable to a point: Grief can make a person self-centered and Lauren is mired in it, even if she wouldn't term it as such. The problem is that the film is no less myopic.
None of the characters are developed beyond their utility to Lauren's arc. Her longtime BFF Julie (Missi Pyle) is a collection of generic sassy-gal-pal quotes like "Fuck the patriarchy!" Later, she makes a new friend (Spencer Stevenson), whom she explicitly describes as the Rupert Everett to her Julia Roberts in My Best Friend's Wedding — i.e., the gay bestie who's there to serve her plot. Not even Sean gets any interiority; his feelings and motives remain a mystery to the end.
The script is at least honest enough to concede that Lauren can be passive-aggressive and petty — one of her most satisfying moments is a Sean-aided bit of comeuppance for her ex and his younger girlfriend (Angelique Cabral). But it's too gentle to take her anywhere dark enough to be interesting — to let her wallow in her misery until we can feel it too, or to allow her to cross over into unlikability and ask us to love her anyway. Even as she comments to Julie that she's felt out of control, her spiral of self-destruction is so mild it barely seems to have any stakes.
Flaws like these could be glossed over with enough wit. Alas, For Worse is lackluster on that front as well, with comic beats mostly too broad and stale to leave an impression. It's not entirely implausible that a 50something mom would be unfamiliar with the term "serving c–t" or awkward about using they/them pronouns, but it's also not that funny when that's the entire joke. Supporting characters like Rick, a wedding guest played by Ken Marino, or Cabral's Sara, rest entirely on the stereotypes about magicians or health influencers so timeworn I kept waiting for subversions that never came.
The only real fireworks come in that late scene between Lauren and Dave — aided, perhaps, by the fact that Landecker and Whitford are married in real life. Landecker has said her screenplay was inspired by her own experience with divorce, and in that instant it's easy to cheer for both her and her fictional counterpart, to feel glad that they've come out on the other side of such pain to allow themselves some true joy and fun again. If only the path there had been more interesting.
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