Holofcener: Enough Said (2013)

Romantic comedies assure us of the future in much the same way that historical dramas assure us of the past, meaning that, in times of great precarity, romantic comedies have to become particularly ingenious to remain relevant – and reassuring. Enough Said belongs with such recent films as About Time and Celeste and Jesse Forever in its effort to grapple with such a time – except it’s possibly even more astonishing in the way that it manages to feel true both to its milieu and to the last great wave of romantic comedies in the 1990s. In essence, it’s about the burgeoning relationship between Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and Alfred (James Gandolfini), two middle-aged people who meet at a party. They’ve both been married, had kids and been divorced, meaning that they’ve been living in their own respective futures for some time. As a result, they’re unwilling to have the future let them down one more time -  not only do they spend a great deal of their courtship trying to envisage their future as a couple, but they try to actually live in that future; it is, in its own way, as much of a time travel romance as About Time. And Holofcener makes that bind the centrepiece of her comedy, as Eva coincidentally forms a friendship with Marianne (Catherine Keener), a poet who she meets at the same party, and who she only gradually realises is Alfred’s embittered ex-wife. Caught between dating Alfred and hearing about everything that made him unbearable, she’s forced into a precarious position that’s almost unbearably tender: every criticism of Alfred makes their rapport feel more fleeting, bittersweet and devoid of futurity. Itinerant films set in LA often decentre the present, but few decentre the future quite so eloquently as this does – and if Holofcener recovers any form of futurity, it’s serial and televisual in nature; the future is something the characters are forced to admit can only happen one day at a time. Yet Gandolfini and Louis-Dreyfus are already in their own decentrered post-televisual future, meaning that it’s at once their return to their televisual heyday and their decisive break from it – and Holofcener brings all her work as a TV director to bear on a film that ultimately feels like it’s designed to be remediated on TVs that no longer exist, rather than on DVDs or mobile devices; it belongs to the tradition of lovingly rescreened and reborrowed comedies of the 1990s, while managing to be poignantly, painfully of its time.