Checkov DID Write Comedies After All

Rating: Null/10 (24 September 2011)

Anton Checkov was wont to describe his great plays - Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard, as comedies but in England directors tend to stress the melancholy and there's a nice link here inasmuch as Julianne Moore appeared in arguably the best film adaption of Checkov that has so far appeared, Vanya on 42nd Street, a play in which, not unlike Crazy, Stupid, Love, characters are apt to fall in love with love objects who are themselves equally unrequitedly in love with someone else. It's further referential in the sequence where Gosling takes Carell's wardrobe in hand which echoes a similar sequence in Come Blow Your Horn where Sinatra, a swinger-about-town, takes strait-laced kid brother, Tony Bill, on a similar shopping and grooming expedition. Referential or not this is still an exceptional feel-good film albeit one with more of a spine than others of the ilk. The acting is uniformly up to snuff with Marisa Tomei making a strong bid to steal if from under the nose of Julianne Moore. Aimed at the Multiplex crown it is close to the crossover point between Multiplex and Art-house and well worth seeing.