film Home > Movie Reviews

Mad, mad love to George Segal: His rabbi counseling an engaged young couple—pretty goyim photographer Isabel (Elizabeth Banks) and even prettier Jew Jonathan (James Marsden)—about their upcoming interfaith union resorts, ineffectually, to flash cards to facilitate discussion. But he’s a breath of casual, almost slapstick fresh air to the otherwise stilted drama Heights, one of those roundelays of the urban middle class that portrays big-city people living insularly in the ant farm of their boring anxieties (see also: Crash, Closer). Photographer Isabel is engaged to Jonathan, who has been contacted by a journalist, Peter (John Light), who has seen a photograph of Jonathan that he thinks Isabel should see before marrying him. Diana (Glenn Close) is Isabel’s alpha-female mother and an actress in a play co-starring boy-toy potential Alec (Jesse Bradford), who lives in the same building as Isabel and Jonathan. And over one 24-hour period, lives and loves come together and drift apart to reveal the past and disclose the present—or something. Were it not for the life-jacket cameos—Segal, a power-playing Isabella Rossellini, and camp-perfect Rufus Wainwright as a spurned lover—Heights might have sunk to predictably tedious lows.