Love Liza

One of the greatest character actors of his generation, Philip Seymour Hoffman takes on a leading role in this painstaking and deliberately slow portrait of grief. Hoffman plays Wilson, a website designer whose wife, Liza, recently killed herself for no apparent reason. Unable to come to terms with the tragedy, Wilson's confusion is accentuated by the fact that she left a note in a sealed envelope addressed to him. Unable to being himself to read it, lest it reveal that he was the cause of her suicide, Wilson begins to slowly unravel mentality and emotionally, developing an addiction to gasoline sniffing while finding solace in the world of model aeroplane building.

A sparsely populated character study, Love Liza is virtually bereft of all narrative urgency as we learn pretty much everything about our central character in the opening ten minutes. From there, director Todd Louiso charts Wilson's deterioration with skill and precision, but fails to inject anything other than a bleak melancholy to the proceedings. It's a well made, supremely acted film, but the overwhelming lethargy of the central character makes Love Liza feel an awful lot longer than its 90 minutes running time. That might be the point but I don't know if that's enough to make it worthwhile.