Lauren and I went to Teatro Adriano today and I made her go to “Immaturi”, another Italian ensemble movie about people in their 30s who have been friends for a long time. Lauren made me ask the teenager selling snacks if I could have ice with my diet coke – she just thought it would be funny to hear her explain why I couldn’t. They have diet coke (coca lite in Italy), they have cups, and they have ice, but only an unreasonable American would expect that the three could be united,
I hadn’t realized how much Lauren disliked “Immaturi” until I heard her telling her Dad about it on the phone.She was really rolling her eyes over the plot – adults that find out that through some sort of technicality they did not actually graduate from high school and must go back and retake their exams. She said it was ridiculous, all of the characters in their own ways immature and the revisit to education and old friends helping them grow up.
Well, if you put it that way it sounds pretty lame. Is there any other way to put it?
I see what she means, but “Immaturi” isn’t “The Black Swan” or “True Grit”. It’s a silly comedy – and as silly comedies go, I didn’t really hate it.
Let’s find the good in “Immaturi”.
1) Raoul Bova. Need I say more?
2) The characters were all pretty likable and I found myself rooting for their success, predictable as it may have been. I could tell that there wasn’t going to be any tragedies in the end, but I was still happy, happy, happy ( you’ll get why I said that if you see the movie) when things turned out the way I wanted them to.
3) I feel that if this had been a Hollywood movie they might have done something extra stupid like make the characters actually go back to high school, with pep rallies and bullies and cafeteria lunches. These guys just had to pass a test and they reconnected to study for it.
4) Except for when the little kids were talking, the dialogue was pretty real. The kids’ was excruciating , just the way I hate it, and this kind of thing can almost ruin a movie for me. Don’t have the kids sound wiser than the adults – it’s been done and it is annoying. Otherwise, the characters seemed like real friends with real problems, and the acting was good.
5) Despite the contrivance of the high school graduation mix-up, there’s a bit of saving grace in watching the characters need to backtrack and take a look at their lives. I think it’s true – we put ourselves on automatic pilot and sometimes it takes a bit of a crash to get ourselves back on the right course.
Immaturi is not what you would call a winner, but it wasn’t a terrible way to spend the afternoon either.
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