Enough Said (film)

Plot

Eva, a masseuse and the divorced mother of a teenage girl, attends a party in Pacific Palisades with her friends, married couple Will and Sarah. There she meets a poet, Marianne, and Will introduces Eva to one of his friends, Albert. After the party, Albert asks Will for Eva's number and, although hesitant since she is not physically attracted to him, Eva agrees to go on a date with Albert, which goes well. Marianne contacts Eva for a massage, and after taking an immediate liking to one another they become friends.

Eva finds herself growing fonder of Albert and they have lunch with his teenage daughter, Tess, who, like Eva's daughter Ellen, is graduating from high school and moving away to attend college. A few days later, Eva goes to her massage appointment with Marianne and realizes that Albert is Marianne's ex-husband after Marianne tells a story about how he manages to pick out onions when scooping salsa — the same story Albert had told Eva, but about guacamole. Tess then arrives at the house and Eva's suspicions are confirmed. Marianne tries to introduce Eva to Tess, but Eva hides behind a tree to avoid the meeting. Eva continues seeing Albert, keeping her friendship with Marianne a secret; likewise, she does not tell Marianne that she is seeing him.

Eva encourages Marianne to voice her complaints about Albert so she can identify potential problems in her relationship with him. At the encouragement of Eva, Sarah and Will invite her and Albert to a dinner party, which ends badly after Eva nitpicks over Albert's faults, which upsets him. At another appointment with Marianne, Eva is exposed when Albert arrives to drop Tess off. He is angry that Eva kept her friendship with Marianne a secret, and breaks up with her.

Eva and her ex-husband take Ellen to the airport for her flight to college. A few months later, on Thanksgiving Day, Eva drives by Albert's home and stops in front of the house on her way to pick up Ellen from the airport. He sees her and she awkwardly waves. He eventually comes outside, to Eva's surprise, and sits with her on the porch while they begin to renew their relationship.

Production

Enough Said was the fifth film written and directed by Nicole Holofcener. After the release of her fourth film, Please Give (2010), she was approached by Matthew Greenfield and Claudia Lewis from Fox Searchlight, who offered to produce Holofcener's next project on the condition that it was more mainstream than her previous films. She wrote three drafts of the screenplay over six months. The premise was partly inspired by Holofcener's own life as a divorced mother of two teenagers and her "feelings and fears about what [her] life will be like when [her] kids go away". While writing the film, she said, "I was having thoughts about my ex-husband and my new boyfriend and thinking about being married and how I'm trying to have a relationship that's happier the second time." Small details of the plot were also drawn from her life; Albert's guacamole-eating habit was inspired by a story that her boyfriend told her about his ex-wife.

Neither Julia Louis-Dreyfus nor James Gandolfini was Holofcener's first choice to play the lead roles. Louis-Dreyfus was cast after she approached Holofcener to express her interest in appearing in one of Holofcener's films. Holofcener's first choice as Albert was Louis C.K., who read part of the script but was not interested in the role. Gandolfini did not feel that he was right for the part, but Holofcener later described him as "perfect". Catherine Keener, who played Marianne, is a frequent collaborator of Holofcener's, having appeared in all four previous films that Holofcener had directed.

The film was shot on location over 24 days in Los Angeles, with a budget of $8 million. It was filmed by cinematographer Xavier Pérez Grobet, with whom Holofcener had previously worked on the HBO television series Enlightened. Although each scene was scripted, the actors would often ad-lib lines of dialogue. The final scene of the film, in which Eva and Albert reunite in front of his house, was improvised by Louis-Dreyfus and Gandolfini. It was edited by Robert Frazen, Holofcener's boyfriend at the time, who had also worked on all four of her previous films.

Gandolfini died of a heart attack in June 2013, almost a year after production on the film had ended but before it was released. The film's editing was complete by then but Holofcener added a dedication to the end-credits reading "For Jim". Gandolfini never saw the completed film.

Release

Enough Said premiered on September 7, 2013 at the Toronto International Film Festival and was released theatrically shortly thereafter on September 18, 2013. On its opening weekend, the film earned $240,000 from four theaters for a $60,000 per-theater average, ranking among 2013's best specialty release openers. It received a wide release on September 27 and gradually expanded to a peak of 835 theaters in late October. Over 121 days in theaters, the film grossed $17.6 million at the U.S. box office. It earned $7.7 million from other countries, making a total worldwide gross of $25.3 million.

The film was released on DVD and Blu-ray formats on January 14, 2014. The Blu-ray disc includes six making-of featurettes, titled "Second Takes", "Cast", "Story", "Meet Eva and Albert", "Nicole Holofcener" and "Julia".

Critical response

Enough Said received positive reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a rating of 96%, based on 169 reviews, with an average rating of 7.7/10, and the critical consensus reads, "Wryly charming, impeccably acted, and ultimately quite bittersweet, Enough Said is a grown-up movie in the best possible way." Another review aggregation website, Metacritic, gave the film a score of 78 out of 100, based on 44 critics, signifying "generally favorable reviews". In their year-end tabulations, Rotten Tomatoes dubbed Enough Said the fifth best-reviewed wide release of 2013 and the runner-up for the best-reviewed romance film of 2013 (second to Before Midnight). Many critics also listed the film among their 10 best of the year.

Specifically, Enough Said was praised for its commitment to realism, both in the way Holofcener's characters converse and in the themes the film addresses. In a review for The New York Times, A. O. Scott claimed that "Line for line, scene for scene, it is one of the best-written American film comedies in recent memory." Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times felt that Enough Said demonstrated "Holofcener's gift for portraying life as it is lived", while David Denby, writing for The New Yorker, wrote that it "approaches novelistic richness". In The New York Times Book Review, Francine Prose praised Holofcener for having written characters "with sufficient depth and wisdom that ... the actors never seem to be movie stars impersonating people. Rather, they disappear into the vulnerable and self-doubting characters they play without a hint of the preening vanity that so often causes cinematic performances to seem forced and shallow."

Numerous critics also praised Gandolfini and Louis-Dreyfus's performances in the film. Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post wrote that Gandolfini brought "superb sensitivity and naked vulnerability" to his portrayal of Albert, while Indiewire's Eric Kohn felt that Gandolfini "truly blossoms" in the film. Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Joe Morgenstern similarly described Gandolfini's performance as "marvelous" and "grounded in genial humanity", and found Louis-Dreyfus to be "equally endearing". Ty Burr of The Boston Globe wrote that Gandolfini gave "a performance of immense tenderness and charm", "as endearing as it is heartbreaking", and said of Louis-Dreyfus, "Holofcener brings out a vulnerability you may have forgotten was in this actress." Slate magazine's Dana Stevens, meanwhile, wrote that "There's no one making films right now who writes that kind of dialogue better than Holofcener ... And it's hard to imagine anyone speaking it better than Gandolfini and Julia Louis-Dreyfus."

In a negative review for the San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle wrote that he found Eva and Albert's romantic pairing implausible and, knowing that Gandolfini died after making the film, found the references to Albert's obesity "awkward and macabre and not at all enjoyable". The Financial Times' Antonia Quirke, meanwhile, described the film as immemorable, "very modest" and "too depressing".