Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
Writer/director: Daniel Schechter, Defiant Screen Entertainment.
Cast: Justin Long, Fran Drescher, Richard Schiff, Kate Berlant, Michael Godere.
Grief and loss are overplayed scenarios in dramas, but Safe Spaces adds something out of the ordinary into the mix.
Certain disconnects become apparent in the professional and personal lives of Adjunct Professor Josh Cohn (Long, Dodgeball, Going the Distance, He’s Just Not That Into You) which are certainly taking its toll as he tries to reconnect with his family.
Josh spends his time between his job and visiting his maternal grandmother Agatha Held (veteran actress Lynn Cohen, Sex and the City, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire) who is in hospital.
He teaches creative writing and during one class, while conducting a review of his students’ assignments, he finds that one student – Sarah – has written about a ‘bad’ date. In front of her classmates, he coerces her to give more detail. A controversial exchange follows in the classroom. Now, his job is on the line as well.
Added to this trauma, his sister Jackie (Berlant, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Sorry to Bother You) comes to ‘crash’ at his house.
Safe Spaces follows this family who are all brought together by the siblings’ ailing grandmother. There’s his estranged father Jeff (Schiff), brother Michael (Godere) and Drescher (The Nanny), who plays Josh’s mother, Diane.
This good-natured New York City comedy explores how people face the modern crisis in their lives, which are both natural and self-inflicted. At its heart, Safe Spaces is about compassion. We should try to have more empathy for people and their struggles. There is now a “heightened sensitivity to other people’s, particularly women’s, feelings”.
This family is unique in that they are “extremely honest with each other”. The result is “kind of this dynamic comedy”.
Schechter’s script is well written. As Richard Schiff points out: “it’s very complicated and complex but kind of beautiful. It’s really about how love is fluid underneath all this confusion and complexity that we live with”.
Who is the scriptwriter for Safe Spaces? If your answer is correct, then you could win one of three DVDs of Safe Spaces. Entries should be sent to [email protected] by Monday, 1 June 2020. Names of the winners will be announced in Frank Cassidy’s PS-sssst…! column on 2 June 2020.
