Landline (2017)

Landline is a textured, silly, sweet, and deeply felt comedy that traces the distance between the most satisfied parts of ourselves and the most desperate, between the people we are and the people we think we should be, and it finds that — for better or worse — we’re all stuck somewhere in between.

With Landline, Robespierre once again proves herself to be one of the funnier filmmakers working. Just as important, she proves herself to be one of the more empathetic directors out there.

Landline is a dramatic comedy about a family full of secrets, and what’s mature — and, in its way, reassuring — about the film is that it views this state of affairs as an all-too-natural one.

Landline is a film about many things: sisterhood, infidelity, growing up, marriage, parenting, self-discovery, etc. That it manages to have illuminating insights about each, and none feeling like they are taking the backseat, is a feat unto itself.

The film is almost as messy as its characters’ love lives, and the early scenes, which take a long time establishing the various subplots, play less like a dramedy than a comedy that could have used more jokes. But the movie gets more earnest and impassioned (not to mention better) as it goes along.