Loves Company – Review. By Simon Thompson
Writer/director Jason Laurits’s Loves Company is an uneven comedy that, while funny in places, doesn’t quiet come together as a whole. While there is a germ of a good movie within Laurits’s script, it is sadly obscured by its flaws.
The plot of the movie focuses on Antoinette (Rachel Dratch), an eccentric lonely shut-in living in the Everglades swamps of Florida. Antoinette is obsessed with Blake De Troy (Jack Plotnick) a washed up tv star whose fifteen minutes of fame gained from being a regular on a game show called The Hollywood Surprise has long since expired. Through various circumstances, Blake ends up in the Everglades, and after crashing his car in the swamps near Antoinette’s home, she takes him into her house to patch him up.
Blake, while at first being under the impression that he has been kidnapped and wanting to escape as soon as possible, has a change of heart after realising that he can shamelessly exploit a kidnapping scandal at the hands of a deranged fan to revitalise his career.
In a nutshell, Loves Company functions as a piss take of Stephen King’s Misery for the social media age. When the comedy is focused on Antoinette and Blake’s dynamic, and how fickle the entertainment industry is, the movie got more than a few laughs (especially a scene where Laurits comedically subverts the infamous cinderblock scene in Misery), and as you realise just how shameless Blake is the movie’s sense of humour really comes alive. What weighs it down however, is that the supporting characters are nothing more than a gaggle of small town redneck stereotypes, who slow down the narrative to a snail’s pace.
Jack Plotnick and Rachel Dratch have a really strong comedic chemistry together, to the extent that this movie could easily have been a two hander for almost the entirety of its narrative and been better off for it. They both give equally strong performances in their respective roles, with Dratch nailing the kookily eccentricity of her character with aplomb. Jack Plotnick, on the other hand, does a fantastic job of conveying Blake’s desperation and vanity, but gives him an undercurrent of pathos and vulnerability that stops you from wanting to strangle him.
Overall, Loves Company is a good comedy which should have been great. Laurits’s script meanders in the second act to a point that it killed the initial immersion that I had, and what I think would have made the second act even better is if Laurits had pivoted the story and tone into being more horrific, as the first act teased.
