The Other Woman Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		2.5

The Other Woman Blu-ray Movie Review

The Other Natalie Portman Film

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater May 20, 2011

I’d start by calling The Other Woman “Natalie Portman’s latest film,” but that’s not entirely true. Yes, it’s the most recent to arrive on home video—after receiving a very limited theatrical run—but the movie was actually completed in 2009, then shelved for two years awaiting distribution. The film was finally trundled out in February to capitalize on Portman’s Black Swan Oscar buzz, and this was a smart move for the production’s financiers. Indie dramas need all the hype help they can get, The Other Woman especially. This is a dark, dour movie about guilt and dead babies and infidelity—not exactly an alchemical recipe for box office gold—and Portman’s presence is the only thing keeping the film from slipping into obscurity, along with the countless other independent productions that fail to find an audience each year. The question is, does The Other Woman deserve an audience? While the film provides its angular female star with a complex and often unsympathetic role—one she plays with nuance—the story is melodramatic, uneven, and even occasionally obnoxious.

One big happy family...

The Other Woman used to be called Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, after the book by Ayelet Waldman on which it’s based, and combined, both titles sum up the film’s justifiably cynical attitude about post-affair marriage. (I’m almost surprised the producers didn’t add a colon, giving us The Other Woman: Love and Other Impossible Pursuits. And then we could have the comedic sequel, The Other Woman 2: Love and Even More Impossible Pursuits.) Natalie Portman plays Emilia, a junior lawyer at a Manhattan law firm who falls for senior partner Jack Woolf (Scott Cohen), a married man. Jack, of course, has an unhappy, she doesn’t really understand me relationship with his uppity gynecologist wife, Carolyn (Lisa Kudrow), a “helicopter mom” who overprotects their precocious 8-year-old son, William (Charlie Tahan), grooming him for future prep-school success. In a flash back—and, literally, the screen flashes white, like a bad episode of Lost—we see how Emilia casually pursues Jack, until opportunity arises on an out-of-town business trip for the two to start an affair. Cue the falling-in-illicit-love montage, showing Jack and Emilia discretely dining together and collapsing into bed. So it goes. Then Emilia drops the bombshell—she’s pregnant. And we’re off again, hop-scotching through time, until Jack is eventually married to Emilia, wife number two. Only, there’s trouble in paradise. The baby’s room in their swank NYC apartment is decorated and furnished with the latest urbanbaby.com-recommended accoutrements, but there’s no baby, and Emilia seems very, very sad. We’re clued in when the unselfconsciously bratty William suggests they sell the dead baby’s stuff on eBay.

And this is where the movie begins. Director Don Roos—most recently known for the Kudrow vehicle Happy Endings—throws us headlong into the competitive world of Upper East Side parenting, where college admissions are determined by pre-school placements and mothers drive themselves neurotic trying to achieve an unobtainable measure of perfection. Emilia has ruined icy Carolyn’s best-laid plans for a superficially happy family, but we’re meant to sympathize—at least partially—with this seemingly unremorseful homewrecker. It helps that Carolyn is almost a caricature of an uptight, controlling hover-mom—fussing over William’s lactose intolerance and freaking out when he only makes it in to his back-up school—but Emilia is just as awful in her own way. Struggling as a stepmom with shared custody, it’s clear that Emilia resents William’s presence in her life—a constant reminder of Carolyn—and at one point, she even tricks him into eating ice cream just to see if he’s really allergic to milk. (If you’ll permit me a mild spoiler on this point: William indeed finds himself in an embarrassing poop-in-pants scenario, which is satisfying for us, the audience, as he is—pardon the expression—such a little shit.) To some extent, Roos does effectively dissect the psychology of being “the other woman.” Emilia is a bundle of hypocritical emotions. She’s had a lifelong resentment of her philandering father—who now wants to play granddad to William—but she herself is married to a man who cheated on his wife. There’s clearly some Elektra-complex business going on.

Then there’s the mystery of that dead baby, which haunts the film—so to speak—until a third act revelation that’s supposed to shed light on Emilia’s conflicted feelings of guilt and give us newfound empathy for her character. This is a bit of a narrative cheat on Roos’ part. Throughout the film we rarely leave Emilia’s perspective, so the fact that this crucial detail is withheld from us for so long just feels like a convenient excuse to throw a last- minute twist into the plot. Storytelling is all about strategically withholding information, but a better film would’ve used dramatic irony instead of a sudden shock. And this points to The Other Woman’s main weakness—it plays up the soap opera histrionics, giving the whole thing a debilitating, depressing Lifetime made-for-TV movie vibe. There’s not much to take away from it. Love is tough. Affairs are messy. Being the other woman is a bitch. No kidding. Nonetheless, Portman is fascinating to watch. As she showed us in Black Swan, she excels at playing women who suffer from a hidden anxiety or grief that they’re trying to keep from the world. Here, she alternates between an illusion of snarky self- sufficiency—a veneer of calcified bitterness—and the open-wounded pain of being a grieving mother who has lost her child. She’s subtle, even where the movie isn’t. Her co-stars? Not as much. Although Kudrow is sometimes scarily intense, her insane-mama shtick veers too close to parody. On the other side, Scott Cohen is pretty much a blank. And while I’m sure Charlie Tahan is a nice enough kid in real life, his character in the film is nigh- insufferable, doling out lines like, “You’re from New Rochelle. You’re not as sophisticated as me and my mom are.” Is it mean if I think a snooty 8- year-old crapping himself is hilarious?

The Other Woman Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

IFC brings The Other Woman to Blu-ray with a 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer framed in the film's intended 2.35:1 aspect ratio. While this indie production doesn't deliver the most sparkling high definition image you'll see all year, the picture seems true to source, with a natural grain structure, no signs of edge enhancement, and no boosting or other tweaking. Like the film itself, the aesthetic here is very naturalistic, with little to no stylization in the color palette. You can expect realistic hues that, while never particularly vivid, are at least dense and accurate, with balanced skin tones and no sudden color shifts or fluctuations. Contrast could probably be pushed a bit more for the sake of pop, but black levels are suitably deep and shadow detail in darker scenes remains lucid. Where the transfer earns high marks is in its consistent level of clarity. There are relatively few soft shots, and in general, skin and clothing textures take on a palpable appearance, with strong fine detail. There are some patches of color that look a bit blotchy with noise, but there's no major banding or macroblocking. All in all, a faithful but rather unremarkable transfer for an unremarkable film about the unfaithful.

The Other Woman Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

From the opening sequence, cross-channel gunshots pop off loudly while a subwoofer-heavy multi-car pile-up emits the sounds of cascading glass, screeching, rending metal, and…yeah, just kidding. The Other Woman is an exceptionally quiet, dialogue-driven drama, with a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track to match. Really, a stereo track would've sufficed here, as there's really no rear channel involvement to speak of. There's some extremely soft ambience on occasion, and music is sometimes bled into the surrounds, but that's about it. Most of the mix is solidly anchored up front, and this is just fine. A film like this doesn't need a booming, all-immersive soundtrack. What's important is fidelity, and there are no problems at all in that regard. Dialogue is crisp and well-balanced throughout—I didn't have to touch my remote once to boost or trim the volume—and John Swihart's minimal score sounds great. The loudest the track ever gets is during the Belle and Sebastian song "Waiting for the Moon to Rise," and if you're familiar with the Scottish twee-pop septet, you'll know that isn't very loud at all. Optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles are provided in easy-to-read lettering.

The Other Woman Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The lone supplement on the disc is a 1080p theatrical trailer, running two minutes and twenty seconds.

The Other Woman Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Other Woman, a.k.a. Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, is all-around depressing. Dead babies, cracked-up marriages, soiled Gap Kids chinos—perhaps it would all be more compelling if director Don Roos had a lighter hand with the material, but as it stands, The Other Woman is a superficial, soap opera-ish slog through the broken lives of New York's privileged upper crust. Rent it if you're curious or a diehard Natalie Portman follower, but it's unlikely that you'd ever rewatch this one enough to want to own it.