The Moderns is what happens when someone reads the back cover of a Hemingway novel, drinks half a bottle of absinthe, and decides they understand art, love, and Paris. Spoiler: they don’t. This isn’t a film—it’s a pretentious mood board stretched into 126 minutes of clove-scented misery.
Directed by Alan Rudolph, the movie wants to be a smoky, intellectual love letter to 1920s Paris, a city where everyone chain-smokes, speaks in tortured metaphors, and casually destroys relationships in between sips of vermouth. What we get instead is a lukewarm jazz track laid over the cinematic equivalent of staring at someone’s unfinished screenplay in a coffee shop while they cry softly into a beret.
The plot? That’s cute. Timid American cartoonist Nick Hart (Keith Carradine) floats around Paris like a sad balloon, doing forgery, drinking too much, and pining for his ex-wife, Rachel (Linda Fiorentino), who has since married a rich, sociopathic art dealer with the personality of wet toast. There’s also a subplot involving fake paintings, fake emotions, and fake accents. But don’t worry—you’ll be too bored to follow any of it.
Carradine gives a performance that can best be described as lightly sedated. He spends most of the movie staring into space like he’s waiting for someone to hand him a reason to care. He’s supposed to be tortured, brooding, sensitive—what he is, though, is vaguely annoyed and terminally undercooked. He talks like every sentence is a leftover from a Bukowski poem passed through a typewriter with a busted spacebar.
Fiorentino, who could smolder her way through a tax audit, does her best to inject some life into this pastel coma. She glides through scenes in high heels and low expectations, trying to convince us there’s emotional weight beneath the art-deco haze. But even she seems bored. You can practically hear her thinking, “This is the movie I made after The Night Caller? Really?”
John Lone plays Bertram Stone, her obscenely wealthy husband, who stalks around like a Bond villain stuck in a French perfume commercial. He’s cold, controlling, and somehow still less threatening than a lukewarm croissant. When he’s not collecting art, he’s casually treating Rachel like a decorative vase—beautiful, expensive, and completely hollow.
And my God, the dialogue. Everyone talks like they’ve swallowed a thesaurus dipped in pretension. Conversations aren’t spoken—they’re performed, like bad jazz improv. You half expect someone to throw a typewriter through a window just to wake the audience up. It’s all very “aren’t we deep?” No. No, you’re not. You’re just exhausting.
The film thinks it’s clever by stuffing the frame with cameos from historical figures—Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas. But they’re reduced to caricatures, like wax museum rejects who wandered into the wrong exhibit. Hemingway (played by Kevin J. O’Connor) spends the movie growling about masculinity and war, but with all the menace of a theater major who just discovered Jack London.
And the pacing? Like molasses wearing a beret. Scenes drag. Subplots wander off and never return. Entire conversations exist just to circle around the fact that nothing is happening. You don’t watch The Moderns—you endure it, like an overlong poetry reading hosted by someone who insists their cat is their soulmate.
The cinematography tries hard to be painterly—shadows, warm hues, lots of slow pans—but it ends up looking like a perfume ad for people who hate joy. Every frame is “artsy,” which is code for nothing actually happens here, but look at that lamp. If this movie had any more soft focus, you’d think someone smeared the lens with baguette grease.
Oh, and the jazz. Nonstop jazz. The kind that makes you feel like you’re trapped inside an elevator going down to hell’s waiting room. A muted trumpet whines through every scene like it, too, regrets signing onto this mess.
By the end, nobody’s changed, nothing’s resolved, and you’re left wondering if it was all some elaborate art school prank. It’s like the characters just wandered off to another bar to restart the whole cycle of passive-aggressive drinking and emotional constipation.
Final Verdict:
The Moderns is an aimless, self-important soufflé that never rises. It wants to be profound but settles for vapid. It thinks ennui is a plot device and that quoting Hemingway counts as character development. It’s all smoke, no fire. All style, no substance. All Paris, no passion.
1 out of 5 stars.
One lonely star for Linda Fiorentino, who looks amazing even when she’s trapped in a dialogue pit with a cast of wax mannequins. The rest? Flush it down the Seine and blame it on the absinthe.
