At first glance, Peace, Love & Understanding looks like your typical indie film. The focus is on characters – relationships between parents and their children, budding romances – and the humor mostly comes from a political place, throwing uptight suit-and-tie types in a confined space with characters who are on the extreme left and watching them all chafe against each other. Chances are you could watch its first trailer and feel like it was an advertisement for a film that you’ve seen a hundred times before. That is, if it didn’t have such an appealing cast. They kind of set the project apart.
Well-worn material or not, it’s pretty hard to catch wind of a movie that’s cast Jane Fonda, Catherine Keener, and Elizabeth Olsen as three generations of very different women and not get a little bit excited. With Fonda and especially Keener, you have a couple of acting veterans who always bring the goods in anything they do. And with Olsen you have a hot young performer who is going to have the eyes of Hollywood on everything she does, at least for her next few projects. Factor in that the leading ladies are being directed by a solid old hand in Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy, Mao’s Last Dancer) and Peace, Love & Understanding looks like it’s going to be a safe risk when you’re deciding what to hand your movie money over to.
At the very least, you should give this trailer a watch just to see Fonda howling at the moon during some sort of crazy, hippie bonfire. Ridiculous. The film is set for a June 8 release. [Yahoo! Movies]