Dames and dragons
At the center of Lovely and Amazing is a dysfunctional family of mostly women. The mother, Jane (Brenda Blethyn), a lonely divorcée, is preparing for liposuction at the hands of a handsome surgeon (Michael Nouri). Her eldest daughter, Michelle (Catherine Keener), makes crafts she can't sell. When her husband (Clark Gregg), who's cheating on her with her best friend, turns caustic about her inability to bring any money home, she impulsively takes a job at a 24-hour photo shop, where her boss is a teen outcast (Jake Gyllenhaal) in desperate need of some sexual confidence. Michelle's sister Elizabeth (Emily Mortimer) is an actress whose neurosis about her looks wins little sympathy from her boyfriend (James LeGros). Jane's third, adopted daughter is an African-American youngster named Annie (Raven Goodwin) who acts out her identity confusion in a series of textbook behaviors (mainly overeating).
Writer and director Nicole Holofcener spells everything out--she even has Annie, whose adoptive family is Jewish, tell a joke that insults both blacks and Jews. Yet the characters' actions remain mysterious. They seem not so much outgrowths of their personalities as inventions designed to illustrate the psychic pressures placed on females (hence the title).
Michelle's decision to get work at a photo lab is an implausible device to set up the next section of the plot, in which she falls into an affair with her adolescent boss. Are we supposed to think she's emotionally so underdeveloped that she's naturally drawn to a 17-year-old? Scenes early on in the movie suggest that possibility, but they're contradicted by her relationship with Annie, whose childishness wears on Michelle and to whom she gasses on ungenerously about their mother as if Annie were another adult. Michelle is dreadful with children; she barely focuses on her own daughter. Yet when her husband, discovering her infidelity, threatens to take the little girl away from her, she weepingly insists that their daughter is the only thing in the world she cares about.
