Love Liza (2001)

Phillip Seymor Hoffman plays the grieving husband who goes nuts, sniffs gasoline and dedicates his life to the above mentioned activity along with mobile planes. His wife killed herself but he doesn't have the guts to read the letter she left him. Love Liza (Todd Louiso) is not a very good film, though it has its moments, and though it is hard not to be affected by the extremely awkward situations the film loves to churn out. The film's radical shifts include shifts from comedy to drama attempting to be serious, but this shift of tone rarely works. As for Hoffman, we see him doing the same thing during the entire movie: he is unhinged, he grieves, he yells, he does stupid things. The problem is that the film stays there, within the husband's edgy demenor, at the same time that the score wraps us into an almost-cozy soundtrack by Jim O'Rourke. Too overt, too one-dimensional and unclear about what it wanted to say, Love Liza was a disappointment.