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The film centers around a fading movie star, who brings her paramour to her
lakeside estate to visit her family on Memorial Day weekend. The setting is
rural Connecticut in the 1980s. The household includes her ailing brother, her
artist son, his ethereal muse, the family doctor, the estate's custodian, the
careless caretaker (Nyqvist) and his wife, their temperamental daughter and her
long-suffering ornithologist husband. During the weekend, a disastrous turn of
events leads the family from dysfunction to heartbreak and, ultimately,
salvation. |
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"At best the characters recall the
wry peculiarity of a John Irving story. More often,
though, Camargo aims so high he inevitably falls short.
He was inspired by Anton Chekhov’s classic play The
Seagull, and there’s simply too much stagy
pretension in the tiresome speeches and self-conscious
eccentricity." ...Elizabeth Weitzman, New
York Post
"Janney is beautifully caustic and vain, Whishaw is
properly infuriating, Hurt is colorfully daft and
Nyqvist all but steals the movie with his bemused,
fractured line readings and droll arched eyebrow at all
these artsy city folk." ...Film critic
Roger Moore
"The big mystery of Days and
Nights is how actor Camargo's rookie directorial
effort attracted such an eminent cast. There has been a
positive surfeit of Chekhov productions on New York
stages recently, most of them abysmal, but none has been
as bad as this "adaptation." Straining for a Chekhovian
mix of farce and tragedy, Camargo completely lacks the
delicate empathy and emotional power of the Russian
master that made his plays' quicksilver transitions in
mood so breathtakingly effective. Camargo’s attempts at
comedy are embarrassing and the dramatic moments even
more so, in a way which makes you pity the actors."
...David Noh, Film Journal
"The cast list for Days and Nights
is so juicy that I approached the movie with
lip-smacking expectations of scenery being chewed and
spit out with histrionic gusto. Even at its worst, how
bad could an updated version of the play be. The answer
is worse than you could imagine. The truncated shambles
on the screen is evidence, if any more proof were
needed, that great actors can go only so far to
salvage an artistic shipwreck." ...Stephen
Holden, NY Times
"Despite a talented ensemble cast,
it’s difficult to invest emotionally in these lugubrious
characters and their various avenues of depression and
dysfunction." ...Todd Jorgenson,
cinemalogue.com
"Eventually, the whole movie falls
into the rift between those two modes. The characters
are so distant from one another that it becomes
difficult to understand who they are and what they want,
and the ellipses fortifying the film’s mood are left to
carry more weight than they can. Camargo all but ditches
the creative self-reflection that courses through
Chekhov’s play, and his adaptation fails to recognize
that a portrait of unrequited love requires a heartbeat
in order to hurt." ...David
Ehrlich, the Dissolve
"Days and Nights has a dreamy
cast, but its shift from late 19th-century Russia to a
New England country estate in 1984 forces the director
to shoehorn his characters and story into Chekhov's
template. The results are predictably mixed. Those who
are familiar with the comedic drama are likely to find
Carmago's ideas interesting, if a bit obligatory, while
those who have neither read nor seen The Seagull may
just come away thinking of it as a pretentious art film.
...Anders Wright, The San Diego Tribune
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