Twelve Thirty (2010)

There are three women in the Langley household: Vivien (Karen Young), the mother, is caught between a fierce independence and an almost agoraphobic attachment to home; seductive and confident Mel (Portia Reiners) is a 19 year-old mirror of her mother; Maura (Mamie Gummer), 22, is alienated, afraid and unable to pinpoint her place in the world. They live together in a seemingly close household, yet each is very much alone. The family's status quo explodes when Jeff (Jonathan Groff) walks into their comfortable yet dysfunctional world. Bright, handsome, ambitious and sure of his future at 22, he's also socially awkward and a sexual novice who's been infatuated with Mel since high school. When they begin working together at the same restaurant, he jumps at the opportunity to finally start a romance with the free-spirited girl - but Mel has other ideas about their time together.

IMDB

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In Twelve Thirty, getting fucked by a bright-eyed college kid proves a bonding experience for one Iowa family. In the aftermath of three wildly different sexual encounters with twentysomething Jeff (Jonathan Groff), spunky Mel (Portia Reiners), her morose sister, Maura (Mamie Gummer), and the pair’s mom, Vivien (Karen Young), re-establish a measure of interfamilial intimacy—both with each other and with the latter’s gay ex-husband. Sexuality runs from the thrillingly casual to the squeamishly disagreeable in Jeff Lipsky’s film, but mostly screwing—like trust, love, and happiness—becomes the stuff of ceaseless conversation. Essentially a series of verbal pas de deux, the film pairs off its six characters (Maura’s Satanist friend completes the sextet) in various arrangements for chats by turns aggressive and stutteringly awkward. These exchanges have an echo-chamber feel to them, as if they’re cut off from both the outside world and the way actual people talk, but realism is clearly not what Lipsky is after. Instead, he crafts an odd self-contained universe in which the characters’ compulsive need to explain themselves or simply hold their interlocutor’s attention stands in for the meaning of the words they actually say, resulting in a film more satisfying in occasional isolated moments than as a coherent dramatic entity. The Village Voice

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Writer-director Jeff Lipsky's "Twelve Thirty" is an ambitious ensemble piece in which every actor is able to shine and every character is a master of the well-turned phrase. It is a film that gradually draws the viewer into its thrall and builds to an effective climax. Two former high school classmates, Jeff (Jonathan Groff) and Mel (Portia Reiners), find themselves working at the same restaurant. Jeff is a shy, awkward rich kid with a crush on the sensuous, confident Mel; he gradually becomes entangled with her family, falling into a nest of expert manipulators. There's Mel's alienated older sister Maura (Mamie Gummer), whose friend Irina (Halley Feiffer) all but forces Maura on Jeff, and there's the siblings' sexually uninhibited mother (Karen Young) and their gay father (Reed Birney), who still has trysts with his ex-wife. Jeff quickly gets in over his head with the clan, but Lipsky suggests that the naive Jeff's impact on this acutely dysfunctional family and its impact upon him just might be enough to cause these people to think beyond themselves and their own needs. Two free-spirited older British ladies (Barbara Barrie, Rebecca Schull) whom Jeff encounters at the restaurant point up just how self-involved the other characters are. Still, Lipsky doesn't ask the audience to feel sorry for his misfits; he uses them instead as a lens through which moviegoers might recognize their own shortcomings. LA Times

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Special Features: - Opening Flashback (01:30) - Irina Reflects (03:32) - Martin Confesses (02:17)

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