As far as quasi-indie comedies go, “Take Care” wants for a lot, and in a strictly technical sense, it is not a “well-made” film.
“Take Care” is, by turns, annoying, intolerable, tone-deaf, redundant, and also breathtaking, painfully candid, charming, and effortlessly poetic. It’s shoot-from-the-hip filmmaking in a stripped-down sense, and one wishes it had forgone some of its more marketable aspects (the comedy hijinks that open the movie nearly had me bolting for the remote), which serve to benefit very little of what follows.
When the film opens, Frannie (Leslie Bibb) is just getting home from the hospital, one of her arms and one of her legs broken from a moving vehicle. The practicalities of getting her up four flights of steep-at-that stairs are the first of many challenges. Enter Frannie’s ex-boyfriend Devon (Thomas Sadoski), whom she cared for over the span of two years during his own bout with cancer. Despite Devon’s continued involvement with the woman he left Frannie for in the first place (it’s even worse than it sounds), he agrees to aid her during her recovery.
Unfolding almost exclusively in the space of a single apartment, “Take Care” often suffers from a lack of composition, with the camera often seeming to have been placed at random, just to mix things up. Furthermore, a great deal of the film’s so-called laughs stem from physical comedy of a most dubious nature (imagine a tone-deaf Saturday Night Live skit featuring an invalid, cranked up to 11).
Thankfully, then, the modesty of the film’s setting and scenario contrast these elements to the point where they evaporate, while the bulk of the film actually involves little more than people simply talking to each other. Bibb and Sadoski are not movie stars in a glamorous sense, but they are talented, and excellent together. Even the unlikable characters become understandable, emblematic of the filmmaker’s generosity.
These long conversational stretches, aided by the restraint of the locations, suggests a theatrical experience, and both Sadoski and Bibb are both unyielding enough in their candor that the immersive effect is enough to compensate for many shortcomings. Simultaneously, that rawness helps cement the impression that these are real people, sincerely and earnestly working to understand themselves and each other under very particular life circumstances. Unfortunate things happened, and terrible things were done. “Take Care” is about what these people do with their hand of cards. The precision with which it examines this chapter in a few people’s lives renders it practically universal, like looking at a grain of sand under a microscope.
Speaking personally, I’m probably inclined to be more forgiving towards a flawed movie that owns up to having to take the bad with the good, than most people. Misconceptions about how to review movies often, at their root, are about objectivity. As emotional experiences go, movies are impossible to properly measure in a literal sense. Robert Warshow wrote, “A man goes to the movies. The critic must be honest enough to admit that he is that man.” As someone who has seen cancer and is empathetic to much of what “Take Care” portrays, it hit very close to home, and it’s unfortunate that it will almost surely be overlooked by most everyone. For a film that so refuses caricature, that it is being marketing as from the producers of “Sex and the City” is a cruel fate.
“Take Care” is now in select theaters and On Demand.
Robert Humanick is a contributing writer for slantmagazine.com
Follow Rob on Twitter @rhumanick
