Leah Fay Goldstein, left, and Peter Dreimanis, the real-life couple who lead rock group July Talk, star in new film Middle Life.Supplied
Middle Life
Written and directed by Pavan Moondi
Starring Leah Fay Goldstein, Peter Dreimanis and Luke Lalonde
Classification N/A; 84 minutes
Screens at the Vancouver International Film Festival Oct. 9 and 11 (viff.org)
Critic’s Pick
It is turning out to be a banner year for movies in which real-life couples play on-screen duos. After this summer’s horror-comedy Together (starring Alison Brie and her husband Dave Franco), the immensely funny, charming and not at all horrifying new Canadian romcom Middle Life offers its own kind of couple double dip, with Leah Fay Goldstein and Peter Dreimanis – the real-life couple who lead the acclaimed rock group July Talk – starring as an against-all-odds pair.
The odds are, initially, stacked way against the coupling – just one of the many ways in which writer-director Pavan Moondi, returning to the big screen after his wonderfully awkward 2017 comedy Sundowners, toys and tweaks the expectations and obligations of the romcom genre.
When the film opens, Andie (Goldstein) is in a seeming state of domestic bliss, or at least placid comfort. She’s recently had a baby with her husband (Sundowners star Luke Lalonde), and is happy – or happy enough – juggling child care with her wedding-planning business. Meanwhile, the single Ryan (Dreimanis) is going through life rather carefree, even if he’s occasionally distracted by problems with his urinary tract, which may or may not be psychosomatic. (The fact that he’s a plumber, specializing in installing bidets no less, is just one of the film’s many breezy gags.)
Goldstein and Dreimanis's characters Andie and Ryan first meet during a car crash. A few months later, the pair reconnects.Supplied
Instead of a meet-cute, Moondi arranges for Andie and Ryan to first encounter each other during a rather horrifying car crash. A few months later, the pair reconnect – an initially innocent collision of drifting souls that gradually turns into something deeper, threatening Andie’s complicated, but not exactly untenable marriage and the responsibility-free aimlessness to which Ryan has become so accustomed.
Set mostly in Toronto, but with a surprising and sprightly late-film detour to Los Angeles, Moondi’s film feels of a piece with his previous work – films in which relationships are tested and almost pulverized – while also pushing into new, more emotionally complex territory.
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Whereas Sundowners and the director’s previous films Everyday Is Like Sunday and Diamond Tongues rode nervy waves of uncomfortable, at times pitch-black comedy, there is a maturity to the comedy and characters in the appropriately titled Middle Life that is both easier to swallow and more vivid and likely to linger.
Although it arrives with a challenging setup – who really wants to see a couple who just had a child give up their marriage? – Moondi’s film steadily and stubbornly gets you to root for Andie and Ryan as not just individuals stuck in messes of their own makings, but as a couple who shouldn’t, on paper, work at all.
The film is mostly set in Toronto, but makes a detour to Los Angeles.Supplied
The director’s light touch keeps it all moving – Moondi also acts as his own editor – while cinematographer Jared Raab (BlackBerry, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie) delivers a portrait of Toronto that is sunny and fresh, somehow making familiar streets seem new. But Middle Life would not work as well as it does without the twinned energies of Goldstein and Dreimanis.
Even if you walked into the film unaware of their off-screen history, the two create such fully formed, likeable characters that you cannot help but want to push them get closer and closer to one another, just to see where the friction ends and the sparks begin. The ease in which the performers slip into their roles feels natural and earned – and continues something of a golden run for Goldstein (who previously headlined Moondi’s Diamond Tongues) and Dreimanis (who scored a juicy supporting role in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners earlier this year).
After making its world premiere at the Calgary International Film Festival last month, Middle Life will screen at the Vancouver International Film Festival later this week, before it hopefully scores a distribution deal allowing the rest of Canada (and other markets) to fall into Goldstein and Dreimanis’s shared world. Perhaps a double-bill roadshow is in order – half the evening for a screening, the other for a raucous July Talk concert. Some things simply go better together.