Rob (Josh Radnor) and Kate (Annie Parisse) are your classic 1970s college professors: open-minded, well-meaning, liberal to a fault. They’ve raised their daughter, Bobbie (Nuala Cleary), to believe activism is not just acceptable but necessary, and that the sexual revolution is more than just a theoretical concept. But starting on the day Bobbie turns 17, the collision between philosophical ideal and messy reality threatens to break the family apart.
Three Birthdays is split into thirds, each covering one character’s birthday spread over the course of about two weeks. While that conceit may imply an anthology format, that’s not really the case here: while each character naturally grabs most of the spotlight for their own birthday, all three main characters feature heavily in each segment, and all three segments follow the same plot throughlines as they deal with the emotional fallout experienced by the entire family.
We open on Bobbie’s birthday, the freshly minted 17-year-old reading to herself a poem she’s written about the virginity she plans to lose a few hours later to her skeezy boyfriend Adam (Uly Schlesinger) with his John Lennon glasses and patchy teenage beard. After they awkwardly do the deed in a no-tell motel, Bobbie and Adam overhear another couple experiencing noisy coital bliss, only to covertly discover that one half of the couple is Bobbie’s mom—and whoever the other half is, it’s not Bobbie’s dad. Flash forward to Rob’s birthday and we’re now several days deep into Bobbie giving her mystified mom the cold shoulder before the weight of the secret is just too much for Bobbie to handle and she reveals her mom’s infidelity to her dad—only to find out he’s aware, and he swears he’s fine with it. Reader: he’s definitely not fine with it, and this uncomfortable conversation—plus other drama unfolding at his job—causes him to upend the delicate balance he and Kate have been maintaining between their loving coparenting and their own somewhat icy relationship behind the scenes. Then finally Kate’s birthday rolls around, with mom finally figuring out what her family has been up to and striving to pick back up the pieces.
Screenwriter/director Jane Weinstock has managed to create three meaty roles that the actors really sink their teeth into. Bobbie is the kind of kid whose parents have always treated her as an adult to the point where she’s convinced herself she is one, only to find her childlike black-and-white view of right vs. wrong is wholly unready for the nuances of adulthood. Newcomer Cleary captures Bobbie’s quivering indignation when things don’t live up to her ideals, and her frazzled confusion at her mom’s indiscretions (e.g. women should be free to sexually express themselves however they see fit…except for my mom, god, she’s in her forties). Radnor (best known for playing Ted Mosby on How I Met Your Mother) plays Rob as a sad sack with a heaping helping of Big Dad Energy, but he then suddenly shifts into a fascinatingly contradictory man who considers himself a fundamentally good person, but who also lies constantly—ostensibly to spare other people’s feelings but really for totally self-serving reasons. Parisse (who has a lengthy TV résumé including Vinyl, Friends from College, and a lengthy stint as an ADA on Law & Order) makes a more subtle shift, particularly in a stellar scene late in the movie when Kate is leading a lecture and you see how she slowly starts using one of her own lessons to mentally deconstruct her own behavior in her open marriage in real time in front of an audience of students not much older than her daughter. That bit finds both Weinstock’s writing and direction and Parisse’s performance at their peak.
Three Birthdays is at its best at moments like those when it’s in character study mode, when characters are stunned when their own hypocrisy comes back to haunt them. There are, however, a lot of plot machinations to Three Birthdays and Weinstock (in her first feature since 2013’s The Moment, starring Jennifer Jason Leigh) does tend to do a lot more telling than showing in order to cover it all. With three action-packed days crammed into just 90 minutes, the pace is positively breathless. While I wouldn’t argue that the movie needed to be longer, it wouldn’t have hurt to back off the throttle a bit to let the characters breathe, especially with a set of performances this strong. As it is, Weinstock’s dialogue can be profound but is just as often perfunctory, used to move the chess pieces around the board or to underline a character’s opinion in one scene to have it pay off in the next. Also, while the film concentrates mostly on 1970’s sexual politics, there’s a constant thrum of anti-Vietnam War sentiment bubbling along as well that ultimately pays off in a way that feels clunky and unnecessary.
Despite these slight shortcomings, Three Birthdays has enough strengths that it’s still worth watching, especially for fans of domestic drama, thanks to its richly defined characters and strong central performances. | Jason Green
Three Birthdays is available on now digital and video-on-demand platforms.
