Momentous Day?

Months back, I read in Entertainment Weekly magazine about a small indie film, an actors' showcase called Any Day Now. It was the two lead actors that caught my interest, a pair of performers who slip back and forth a fair amount between comedic and serious roles.

Garret Dillahunt has played a Terminator in The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a sadistic rapist in The Last House on the Left, and two different recurring roles on Deadwood... but these days he's most recognized as the dim-witted father Burt on Raising Hope. Alan Cumming has played comic relief in Goldeneye, over the top villainy in Josie and the Pussycats and the Spy Kids series, and Nightcrawler in X2... but he's also starring in a one-man Macbeth on Broadway this summer, on his hiatus from his very dramatic role on The Good Wife. Both men are exceptionally gifted actors who bring incredible nuance to every role they play, whether the roles would seem to deserve it or not.

Any Day Now gives both of them a full meal to sink their teeth into. They play gay men in 1979 Hollywood, who meet in a bar where one of them (Alan Cumming) works as a drag performer. Just days after they meet, the performer meets a neighbor kid with Down syndrome, whose mess of a mother has just been arrested for drug use. To avoid seeing the unwanted kid passed around foster care, he goes to the man he just met (Dillahunt) to recruit his skill as a lawyer to secure custody of the boy. Soon, the three are living together as a family, trying to conceal the true nature of their relationship to keep the child from being taken away.

There are parts of the film that effectively tug on the heartstrings. There's a lot of genuine emotion in the film, and the skilled actors really squeeze every bit of juice from the premise. But there's also often something quite melodramatic about the script itself. That is to say, for every genuine moment, there's another that seems to come across as a "Very Important Movie" with its hand out for an Oscar. (The film wasn't nominated for any.) It feels a bit overly manipulative at times... and yet, there's no denying that the movie has some powerful things to say in the final act.

In all, I'd say there is enough material of substance to outweigh the melodrama. Even if there weren't, it would probably still be worth seeing for the exceptional work of Garret Dillahunt and Alan Cumming. But this also isn't the "movie of the year" it seems to think it is. I'd grade it a B.