French Exit (2021)

Score: 3 / 5

Michelle Pfeiffer is one of the best character actors of her generation, usually combining her age-defying beauty with cold, distant cruelty. Naturally, this often eases her into villainous roles, ones that ooze gilded sensuality from balustrades of wealth as she climbs (or descends) steps of social strata. And so is the case in French Exit, a rare comedy that capitalizes on Pfeiffer's unique sense of luxurious detachment. If produced onstage, it would almost certainly be labeled as a farce: its absurd contrivances remind me more of Frank Capra or Noel Coward than of anything in Pfeiffer's list of credits. Even the first episode of Schitt's Creek was more confident in embracing farce than this movie. Apart from Pfeiffer's character, everyone else feels like a caricature meant to swirl around her and inform little of the story or themes apart from the weirdness of her life.

Frances Price is newly broke. A Manhattan heiress and socialite, some years widowed, she has been raising her son Malcolm (Lucas Hedges) much as she herself behaves. Indifferent to the restrictions of the lives of others, she -- in an early introductory scene -- plucks her son out of boarding school with a rebellious smirk, defying the headmaster and tempting Malcolm to indulge his whims. But she's playful and engaging, probably more with her son than she was in her marriage. Time leaps forward quickly to Malcolm as a young man, swaddled in his privilege (Hedges is deliciously disassociated from his character), secretly engaged to his girlfriend (Imogen Poots). Suddenly -- and this is the inciting incident -- Frances is slapped with the reality that she and Malcolm have blown through their entire fortune.

Of course, that's what happens after probably two decades of living it up without any new income. Frances can't even pay her housekeeper the $600 of her wages. Instead, she starts to crack, drinking her last reserves of good wine as she sharpens knives in a dark kitchen; Malcolm's latent fear in seeing her thus is a wealth of humor for us, but it reminds us that dramatic renditions of this scenario would probably result in some kind of violence. Not so here, where the characters seem to be keenly aware that they are clichés -- Frances drily says as much to her friend Joan (Susan Coyne) -- as sad, rich white people who are no longer rich.

Thankfully, Joan offers her empty Paris apartment to her newly homeless friends, and so Frances and Malcolm embark on the titular French "exit." They take few possessions with them, but they intentionally bring Small Frank, their formerly stray black cat, whose green stare and deliberate movements suggest alarming sentience (spoiler alert: the cat is evidently Frances's husband reincarnated). Paris doesn't seem to fix the relational problems Frances and Malcolm have, but they are soon jolted out of their self-pitying stupor by Madame Reynard (the hilarious Valerie Mahaffey), an eccentric expat who seems to think her own first name is "Madame." Her bubbly energy almost entirely disguises the fact that she is actively reinventing herself, and her eagerness to forge kinship with Frances is endearing when it's not a little cringey. Frances is initially cruel to her, determined to ward off any real emotions, and so when Madame Reynard simply replies, in a voice that only slightly breaks, "I'm ... lonely," she immediately breaks any ice left between the women.

Other, poorer attempts at human connection become the driving motifs of the film, often helped by the production design. Though it seems to take place in the present day, characters often use pay phones or send postcards to communicate, and their stilted language reminds me more of George Bernard Shaw or David Lindsay-Abaire than of real-life speaking patterns. Other characters fly in and often stay in the apartment, including Danielle Macdonald as a sad fortune teller on the transatlantic ship who psychically knew Small Frank wasn't just a cat, a private investigator (Isaach de Bankole) Frances uses to locate Small Frank when he disappears, and even Malcolm's recent ex-fiancée shows up again with her new boyfriend. By the time Joan checks in on her friend and discovers her apartment has become a bizarre hostel, the movie careens wildly toward its simple, silly, and sweet ending. It's not a rollicking comedy the whole time -- although when a seance results in Tracy Letts doing voiceover as Frances's deceased husband, I almost lost it -- but it's got some cool ideas on its mind.