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joshrowley1.0

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Mark Tinta

A ponderous, pointless, endless gabfest of a home movie written and directed by Carlo Gabriel Nero, starring his parents Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero (they're also producers), Carlo's wife Jennifer Wiltsie, and their daughter Lillian Nero, along with other family friends. Dumped on Prime Video this past weekend with zero fanfare, this British drama presents the plight of the once-prominent Wellsley family, led by doddering, declining matriarch Lady Sarah (Redgrave), as they've fallen on hard financial times and are forced to make a decision to sell their stately manor and vast surrounding property and see it turn into a housing or retail development. That's it. That's what it's about, and there's no reason to give the slightest shit about any of these people. For 112 of its 113 tortuous minutes, THE ESTATE is an unbearable acting exercise for all involved. Redgrave and Franco Nero (as Filippo, the loyal, long-serving head of the Wellsley servant staff) mainly hang back and watch the rest of the cast embarrass themselves with their hammy, playing-to-the-rafters histrionics that should, at the very least, result in a SAG-AFTRA suspension of TBD length. Characters pontificate and soliloquize about real estate, property values, class struggles, and whatever else. The servants hang around outside, one smugly insufferable asshole strumming an acoustic guitar and randomly breaking into song. Everyone is terrible--yes, even Redgrave and Franco Nero--but Wiltsie is the worst offender, taking her character's grief over the loss of her son and turning it into something akin to an overcaffeinated Kristin Wiig playing Shelley Winters in an SNL soap opera sketch, twirling around, breaking down, bellowing impromptu Shakespeare passages, and generally making a showboating spectacle of herself as her husband does jack shit to rein her in. On occasion, Redgrave's Lady Sarah sees apparitions of field hands and settlers of generations past, a clunky bit of foreshadowing for when Carlo Nero turns THE ESTATE into a Jordan Peele-esque horror movie for bankrupt aristocrats in the last minute. Astonishingly pointless and insufferably self-indulgent, THE ESTATE can barely qualify as a movie. It's arguably the worst film Franco Nero's been in and it's definitely Redgrave's worst. It seems Carlo has cast his mom and dad in several of his movies, and there's a telling moment early on when Redgrave and Franco longingly look in each other's eyes and you see a decades-long love still in bloom. Either that or they're thinking "Jesus Christ, the things we do for our kid."

Lebowjetski

The cinema is emptying itself, should I also leave ?