Written by Amy Fox based
on her own Broadway play, ‘Heights’ tells the story of five individuals
whose lives are entwined on one New York day. Prinicpally, Diana (Glenn
Close) is giving a class at Juillard on the day of her birthday; she has
a daughter Isabel (Elizabeth Banks) who is a photographer who is engaged
to Jonathon (James Marsden) a lawyer. Alec (Jesse Bradford) is a young
actor who is auditioning for a play to be directed by Diana. All
the action revolves around Peter (John Light) a British reporter who is
doing a piece on a famous photographer Benjamin Stone, for whom it turned
out Jonathon posed for and subsequently had a sexual relationship with.
This puts a dampener on that engagement and so the complexities and difficulties
of modern day relationships in American society, especially such a big
city as New York. But we have seen films like this before in many guises,
done better than this of course but also done worse than this; the cast
should be credited for giving it their all you can tell the film was shot
over a short span of time - but have we not seen too many of these multi-strand
plots but I am surprised such a play existed in this form. The expansion
of more characters extended its scope but overall the message has been
lost - you do not know everything about the people you think you know,
but as Alec says on an answer phone message, ‘It’s a small fucking world’.
