‘French Exit’: A Great Michelle Pfeiffer Performance is Wasted By Zany Antics [Review]

Review originally posted on 10.11.20 as part of my coverage of The 58th New York Film Festival. “French Exit” will be released on VOD this coming Friday, April 2nd, 2021.

Frances Price has been widowed for 12 years. She and twenty-something son Malcolm have been on an economic, not to mention spiritual, downfall ever since Frances’ late, and very rich, husband Frank passed away. The good news is that it appears that Frank has been reincarnated as a black cat whom she names Small Frank. Son and cat will both be needed in Frances’s next adventure in life, Paris.

In the dry and acerbic “French Exit,” a comedy of manners directed by Azazel Jacobs, he and Patrick DeWitt have adapted the source material from the Dewitt's novel of the same name, but to rather mixed effect. In a flashback, Frances — played by a bewitchingly deadpan Michelle Pfeiffer — is shown pulling Malcolm (Lucas Hedges) out of boarding school the same day Frank dies because, it’s quite clear, this selfish individual needed someone new to love her. Talk about Freudian, this film has shades of the famed psychologist’s “Oedipus Complex” theory all over its all-too-aloof 115 minutes.

Now the formerly-privileged Frances has run out of cash, she’s practically penniless, and has made the decision to go with Malcolm and Small Frank to Paris. She auctions off the prime antiques in her luxurious home, converts her earnings to Euros, and sails off on a cruise ship across the Atlantic, where she and Malcolm discover that cruise ship morgues are an actual thing, before holing themselves up in a borrowed Paris apartment for an undetermined period of time.

Here’s a film as hyper-literate as an Alex Ross Perry or a Whit Stillman movie, but with a little more added silliness. Jacobs’ storytelling here is a little more restrained and less dramatic than it was in his far better earlier films, like “Terri” and “The Lovers.” Just when you think the film might hit its stride and get some momentum going, Jacobs purposely pulls away, refusing to play by fixed narrative rules. He’d rather go for original screwball energy than concentrate on any kind of forceful character dramatizations. The result is a film that is utterly indifferent in tone, trying oh so hard to be the cool kid at the corner when, in actuality, nobody wants to hang around with it.

Of course, when depicting people who seem to be stuck in their own shattered bourgie existence, there is the need to show just how out of step with reality these people can be, but the choice for surrealism by Jacobs is a bit too far-fetched and severely offputting to fully zing with cinematic bravado.

The ultimate problem with “French Exit” is that it never really knows where it wants to go, misguidingly substituting Pfeiffer’s beautifully intricate performance, her best in decades, in favor of supporting characters who turn out to just not be as interesting or fulfilling as Frances. Playing a suicidal shiksa queen, Pfeiffer’s Manhattan socialite deserved to be in a better, more layered movie than this one. The 62-year-old actress, still stunningly beautiful, laces every line with the kind of acerbic wit that would make Bette Davis proud. “My plan was to die before the money ran out,” she announces before the commencement of her final French adventure, “but I kept and keep on not dying, and here I am.”

And so, “French Exit” goes from one continent to the other depicting this awkward mother-son relationship. Malcolm is such a consenting mommy’s boy that he even decides to ditch his new fiancé in Manhattan (the always-excellent Imogen Poots) to go along with this latest ego-driven affair with Frances. Their bond veers on the perverse, in the way son totally surrenders to mother, in every possible instance.

Once in Paris, new friends emerge for the pair. Danielle Macdonald plays a horny cruise ship psychic; Valerie Mahaffey is the lonely widow who has a dildo in her freezer; Jarmusch alumn Isaac de Bankolé is the detective hired to find Small Frank when he goes missing. And so on. But the more characters pile up, the more Frances is buried, and the less invested we are in the movie, especially as the screenplay deviates further into fantasy and mushy messaging (“love and friends is something money can’t buy”). It’s the kind of misbegotten affair you hate to speak ill of, mostly because the intentions are no more than admirable, but Jacobs fails to truly grab us. The result is a rather thin rendering of DeWitt’s novelistic prose, one which gets bogged down by the inefficient delivery of its ambitions. [C]