lastweekendfilm.com
Theo Green (Zachary Booth) and his mother, Celia (Patricia Clarkson), greeting each other in the driveway of the Green family’s Lake Tahoe home in LAST WEEKEND.
With Last Weekend, directors Tom Dolby and Tom Williams made a film suggesting Woody Allen in a wistful, Chekovian mood—but set amongst the affluent denizens of northern California, not Manhattan. Last Weekend is a bittersweet comedy of upper class manners, unfolding over Labor Day weekend at the Green family’s posh Lake Tahoe vacation home. Their compound is worthy of Architectural Digest with its fieldstone and log buildings. A live-in family of Mexican caretakers tends to the property year round.
The protagonist, the slightly flighty family matriarch Celia, dominates Last Weekend through a nuanced and sympathetic performance by Patricia Clarkson (Vicky Cristina Barcelona). She checks the mirror with a shrug before greeting her adult children and their companions, arriving for their customary long weekend on the lake. She is sharp tongued and disdainful of the nouveau rich and their McMansions, and embraces social causes with a feather-light hug. The meal she serves counts not calories but the carbon emission caused by each food item. Change ruffles her as she feels the gentle tug of impending old age. Celia ponders selling the house but can’t imagine “who else deserves to live here.”
Her children don’t fully realize how good they have always had it; one son is married to an annoying achiever peddling her brand of flavored “fresh water”—of course, ignoring the environmental cost of all those plastic bottles.
Last Weekend is a series of conversations and confrontations as Celia tries to organize her increasingly out of control world as if it was a perfectly organized Martha Stewart dinner party. It’s out Dec. 30 on DVD.
Last Weekend - Official Trailer from Water's End Productions on Vimeo.
