Movie Review: Peace, Love, and Misunderstanding Offers a Hippie ...

Good actors, the saying goes, can take a bad script and make it into a good movie. And while Peace, Love, and Misunderstanding is by no means a good movie, Catherine Keener and company manage to force a run-of-the-mill rom-com date flick aimed at female over-40 crowd into a palatable, almost cute little comedy about rejuvenating souls. Keener plays Diane, a 40-somethingNew York lawyer whose husband, Mark (Kyle MacLachlan), opens the movie by announcing his desire for a divorce. Shell-shocked, Diane does what she apparently hasn?t done for twenty years: run home to mom.

Mom is the eternal hippie Grace (Jane Fonda), a bubbly caricature of free spiritedness. When the uptight Diane arrives with her two teenage children, Zoe (Elizabeth Olsen) and Jake (Nat Wolff), she tells her mother to lay off the men and the marijuana during her stay. But the hippie life begins to have its effect on the three city slickers. Soon Jake has a crush on a coffee shop waitress, Zoe is falling for the green-eyed butcher (Chace Crawford), and Diane is indulging a fling with the carpenter-singer Jude, (Jeffrey Dean Morgan).

We?re dealing with types here, and the medicine of the laid back, mindless life works on the film like an over the counter pain killer (if only we just chilled out a little and took time to howl at the moon, life would be bliss, the movie preaches). And while some of the hammy hippie moments fall flat, there?s an appealing, cutesy honesty to the foils and foibles on display, from nervous teenage kisses to hapless middle-aged romantic miss-steps. The showiest performances are Fonda and Olsen?s ? two undaunted idealists straining to fulfill type ? but it is Keener who finds something that resonates in her vulnerable lead role, a little dimension that gives the audience an emotional point of perspective in a movie that is otherwise built to shamelessly please.

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