In Somewhere Tonight, two lonely people meet while chatting on a phone sex line.
Two lonely souls find a connection – literally – in Somewhere Tonight, which loses out on the distinction of being the first film to feature a phone-sex-line meet-cute simply by virtue of the fact that it's a remake.
Freely adapted by writer-director Michael di Jiacomo from the late Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh's 1994 drama 1-900, the film stars real-life couple John Turturro and Katherine Borowitz as Wooly and and Patricia, New York misfits quickly reaching the end of their respective ropes. He is a sexually stifled bike courier who speaks in a dazed childlike cadence and whose only friend is a droopy basset hound named the Amazing Helmut, while she is a self-described agoraphobe ("I tell people it's a fear of sweaters") whose last relationship was a long-distance correspondence with a stranger from Kuala Lumpur.
Whether one finds such details fetchingly specific or wretchedly precious will determine how much enjoyment one will get out of Somewhere Tonight. The acting is fine – both Turturro and Borowitz inhabit their characters with total commitment – but the combination of a static dramatic situation and some truly overwrought writing undermines their performances. Wooly's sad-sack bearing is intermittently affecting, but Patricia is a particularly implausible creation, brittle and brainy one moment, hopelessly naive the next. Instead of feeling her shut-in character's anguish and optimism at the prospect of being drawn outside her domestic prison by the possibility of an actual romance, we're distracted by more of those twee details – such as the fact that Patricia believes her epistolary paramour stopped writing because he was crushed to death by a tree.
Bad dialogue in a film that is basically just wall-to-wall talking is a major problem, but it's not the only one on display. While di Jiacomo deserves credit for giving his actors space to breathe via a few long, uninterrupted take, he never quite overcomes the static nature of the material (van Gogh's original script was, unsurprisingly, adapted from a play). The few stylish techniques he does use, such as some split-screen compositions, feel patchy as opposed to deftly woven into the visual scheme. And the final shot is an egregious case of aesthetic overreaching – a pointless show-off flourish.
Somewhere Tonight means to be a movie about damaged people bravely trying to heal themselves, but it's ultimately pretty timid stuff. Its repetitively written and staged scenes – he thrusts, she parries; he hangs up, she calls back – are just marking time en route to the inevitable will-they-or-won't-they conclusion, which at least plays out with a little bit of graceful humour and surprise. But the overall effect of so much dowdy, claustrophobic desperation is gruelling, and eventually the film starts to give off the vibes of a vanity project. Whatever pleasure Turturro and Borowitz got from working together on this low-budget, low-impact labour of love is not passed on to the audience.
Adam Nayman