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- The Oranges
- Production year: 2011
- Country: USA
- Cert (UK): 15
- Runtime: 90 mins
- Directors: Julian Farino
- Cast: Adam Brody, Alia Shawkat, Allison Janney, Catherine Keener, Hugh Laurie, Leighton Meester, Oliver Platt
It is 26-year-old Leighton Meester's destiny to appear in a movie alongside Julianne Moore, playing the younger and older selves of the same character. This hasn't happened yet – but here she is certainly part of a very good cast, and she holds her own among very seasoned performers. Despite its promisingly sprightly tone, however, The Oranges disappoints with its gooey liberalism and its failure to find a convincing dramatic register for the central relationship. Meester plays Nina, the tearaway daughter of Terry and Cathy (Allison Janney and Oliver Platt), who live in the New Jersey boondocks across the street from their oldest friends, David and Paige (Hugh Laurie and Catherine Keener), whose marriage is failing. Nina has come home to the family nest after a failed romance in San Francisco, and promptly begins to fall for the most inappropriate person possible: middle-aged David, played by Laurie as the rumpled, lovable Jekyll to the nasty Hyde of his smash-hit TV show House. The repercussions are naturally horrendous. David has presumably known Nina since she was a tiny little kid, and so the transgression should be pretty shocking to them both. But their growing affair seems weirdly innocuous and bland, and the business of sex is primly glossed over. It is as if any visible chemistry between the two has to be downplayed or overlooked so that the tone stays light and offence is avoided. Janney steals the movie in the scene in which she discovers the awful truth.
