Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation is already probably the best-reviewed film of 2011, so nobody needs me to sit here and rattle on about
how great it is. But there is one aspect of it that I want to get into, a bit.
I’ve discussed elsewhere the problem of different acting
temperatures mixing in the same film – most recently in my review of Young Adult, where I felt Charlize Theron was giving a bullet of a performance in
a different movie than the rest of the cast, and not in a good way. I’ve chewed
off many a friendly ear over the years talking about this phenomenon. American
Beauty is a particularly egregious example; every single actor in it seems to
be in a completely different film, and it drives me up the wall. Literally -- I
once drunkenly scaled a wall to express my hatred of American Beauty.
