1. It's hard to believe that the guileless but emotionally intelligent Rene would be so brazen in disrespect to Dennis, taking lovey-dovey phone calls from the woman he stole from Dennis right in front of him. That's asking for another punch in the face, or worse.
2. It's tough to imagine a Homeland Security-era American border patrol officer so lax and bribe-able as the one who appears in this film when Rene and Dennis go to New York to sell Christmas trees.
3. Sally Hawkins' creamy Russian dressing accent makes you wonder whether there were no suitable Russian actresses available to play "sassy immigrant neighbor" in New York at the time of filming. (But I laughed out loud when she said, "…like Vunna White on 'Fortune Wheel….'")
4. Dennis' psychotic bullying and mugging of an innocent rival tree salesman doesn't square with the film's attempt to make him seem lovably harmless deep down. Nor with the fact that, as a parolee illegally out of his home country, he'd be doing everything possible to lay low.
5. Diner owners in laidback Greenpoint, Brooklyn who are so obnoxious as to snatch Dennis out of their bathroom mid-pee because he isn't a paying customer. Nowhere in Brooklyn has this ever happened. Worse, the moment is scored to a warm Christmas ballad, for leaden irony. Much later, after he's somehow made amends with the assholes and sets a few bills on the counter en route to the john, the same jerk who ejected him now accepts his cash with a sneering, "F@$k you very much!" Nothing like this has ever happened anywhere.
6. Dennis and Rene take so many foolish risks for the sake of formulaic (if subtly played) comic set pieces that it becomes clear that Morrison and screenwriter Melissa James Gibson are more interested in yuks worthy of a Sundance Audience Award than considering what could be funny or suspenseful in a more realistic scenario. A comical jazz combo instructs us not to take anything too seriously.
It's a shame, because I kind of love Morrison's vision, which aims to filter Capraesque sentiments (about good men going through hard times) through textured, layered Altman styling. Cinematographer W. Mott Hupfel III captures the palpable winter chill, ratty beards, linty coats and lived-in interiors in gorgeous medium-length takes and slow zooms right out of "McCabe & Mrs. Miller." In one beautiful bit of Altmanesque overlap at the Brooklyn tree stand, a delicate zoom keeps two dueling conversations in frame and three flavorful accents—African, Russian, Canadian—in aural deep focus.
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