Tadpole

Oscar (newcomer Stanford) returns to New York from boarding school still nursing a longtime crush for Eve (Weaver). He's cultured, articulate, confident and about half her age. Worse, she's his stepmother. Fortunately, she has no inkling of his real feelings. Unfortunately, after a bout of drunken displacement activity, Oscar wakes up in bed with Eve's best friend, Diane (Neuwirth), who sees no reason not to broadcast her good fortune. Set in the same Upper East Side social bracket as Woody Allen and The Royal Tenenbaums and, and with a hero in the precocious adolescent mould of Igby Goes Down, this seems an unlikely candidate for the grungy DV treatment - and frankly, the film looks ghastly. That's not just down to technical limitations. Camera placement and cutting are often heavy handed, and it's easy to believe that the recourse to literary quotation cards is to camouflage ungainly scene transitions. That said, the film is funny, with a witty, eloquent script, and a standout turn from Neuwirth, who sinks her teeth into the role with the lust you'd expect of a woman of a certain age relishing a chance to reinvigorate her love life.