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THE SIMIAN LINE Send This Review to a Friend
From Weehawken, New Jersey, one can look across the Hudson River and see Manhattan, but it's still a long way from experiencing the bustling life of Manhattan. It's somewhat like that with the characters in "The Simian Line." We're stuck with them in Weehawken and there's not much excitement.
One Halloween night a group gathered at a party is entertained by Arnita, an edgy psychic (Tyne Daly) and she lashes out at the cynical attitude she encounters by predicting that by the end of the year one of the couples present will break up. The set-up is rather silly to start with in this film written and directed by Linda Yellin.
The most interesting character is Katharine (Lynn Redgrave), a real estate broker, owner of the 300-year-old town house in which the party takes place. She has a younger lover (Harry Connick, Jr.) and, worried about losing him because of her age, she is fiercely and destructively jealous. It doesn't help that the beautiful Sandra (Cindy Crawford) has moved in next door with her husband Paul (Jamey Sheridan). One feels for Katharine, largely because Redgrave is such a convincing actress that she makes palpable the anxieties Katharine is enduring. It is a moving performance, and when Katharine pays a nervous visit one day to the psychic, her angry rejection of Arnita as a fraud compounds the stress with which we see Katharine struggling.
As for the rest, it is difficult to care much about Sandra and Paul, or for Katharine's tenants, the rather ditsy young couple Marta (Monica Keena) and Billy (Dylan Bruno). Marta, a rock singer, has a young son whose father is dead and it is a struggle to raise him as well as carry on a life with her rock musician boyfriend. The visit of a social worker (Eric Stoltz) generates a fear that the boy may be taken away.
The most ridiculous ploy of all is the presence of two ghosts in Katharine's house. William Hurt plays Katharine's grandfather who has been dead for 80 years, and Mae (Samantha Mathis) is a ghost from the 1920s. The spirits strike up a relationship and also try to be do-gooders and help the living.
The film takes its title from a line the psychic finds in Katharine's palm. You don't need a fortune teller to help you spot the banalities in this pretentious effort. "The Simian Line" may help put Weehawken in the limelight but that's about it. A Gabriel Film Group release.
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