Flickers of exquisite acting pierce darkness of 'Love Liza'

It's hard to love "Love Liza," Todd Louiso's well-crafted but grim exercise in misery, but hiding within it are moments of exquisite acting. Watch Kathy Bates as Mary Ann Bankhead, midfilm, facing a neighborhood child who innocently asks the whereabouts of Mary Ann's daughter Liza, not knowing that Liza has killed herself some days before. The flicker of emotions on Bates' broad, no-nonsense face is devastating — there's hope (Could Liza still be living? Could it all be a bad dream?), disbelief, then a flood of sadness. It's just a tiny moment, but Louiso and Bates make it a poem.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, as the dead woman's distraught husband, Wilson, dominates the film, giving a fine, carefully modulated performance that nonetheless feels a bit familiar — we've seen his particular brand of thick-voiced, slouchy misery-in-a-sad-windbreaker before. (Hoffman seems most alive when cast against type; watch him as a playboy in "The Talented Mr. Ripley," or a slick phone-sex king in "Punch-Drunk Love.") Wilson comes home, in the movie's opening scene, to find his wife dead, and the rest of the movie is a downward spiral for him; he loses his job, learns to sniff gas and becomes something of an outcast.

It's rare, and grimly refreshing, to see a movie that treats death as something that can permanently alter those left behind; there's no note of hope here, no artificial feel-good ending. These people are, quite simply and quite believably, devastated, and will never be the same again. But Gordy Hoffman's screenplay (he's Philip Seymour Hoffman's brother) doesn't give us enough to connect to. We get no sense of Liza, or what Wilson might have been like before the tragedy. And a sudden declaration of love from Wilson's co-worker (well played by Sarah Koskoff) is mystifying.

The title "Love Liza" refers to a letter left behind by the dead woman, which Wilson carries around unopened; it implies a closure that the movie never really finds.

That's not a flaw in this careful slice-of-life indie, but it may make it difficult to find an audience. Those willing to forgo the pleasure of a happy (or even mildly hopeful) ending, however, will find "Love Liza" has its own rewards.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com