Shutter to Think

SnapPING OUT: Isabel (Elizabeth Banks) searches for a different frame of reference.

Five lives intersect through the work of a troubled photographer.

Heights

by Cindy Fuchs

Isabel (Elizabeth Banks) takes lots of pictures of the Korean grocer across the street. While it's starting to bother her lawyer fiance, Jonathan (James Marsden), she's still thinking about how she can get a "higher angle." Tomorrow," she asserts, "I'm going to the roof." She can't possibly know that the roof will reveal more than a different look at the grocer, but you might, given the arrangements of tight interiors and artful dialogue in the early moments of Heights.

Adapted by Amy Fox from her one-act play, Chris Terrio's movie sets Isabel's day at the center of five intersecting lives. It makes some repeated metaphors (Isabel's self-protective framing of experience through her camera lens) and carefully choreographed melodrama (cell phone conversations appear in split screens). But it also allows subtle performances.

Rushing from work (she's a wedding photographer) to a pre-ceremony conference with Jonathan's earnest childhood rabbi (George Segal), to a meeting with Times magazine editors who want her for exactly the sort of journalistic essay photography she wants to do, Isabel seems bound up in inevitable disappointment. That her mother is renowned actress Diana Lee (the frankly wondrous Glenn Close) compounds Isabel's sense of pressure and regret.

The much-coupled Diana is aware that her philandering husband is sleeping with her younger understudy, she seeks distraction in a young actor (Jesse Bradford), who resists her seduction attempts. Not one to wait, Diana quickly homes in on other diversions, whether dancing partners or professional collaborators, underlining her distinction from Isabel, who wants to make her decision deliberately. Rejecting an ex-boyfriend's efforts to rekindle their attraction, Isabel says, "In 20 years, you'll still be smoking pot on rooftops with girls who don't know who to love." But when he asks where she'll be, she offers only, "Someplace else." That she doesn't have a clear picture is reinforced when she shoots a photo of a woman and her child on the subway and the mother asks, "You ain't got your own fucking life?"

Isabel wants to believe Jonathan's assertion that they are "real people … having a very real wedding." But you know he's lying. Contacted by a Vanity Fair writer concerning an about-to-open exhibit — featuring shots of a college-age Jonathan in ecstatic throes — Jonathan spends much of his day trying to keep this from Isabel.

It is, of course, no coincidence that the secret lurks in the form of photographs. While Diana finds both release and control in performance, Isabel seeks order in her photographs. Seeking the sort of life her mother hasn't had, Isabel finds other ways to deceive herself.

Heights Directed by Chris Terrio A Sony Pictures Classics release Opens Friday at Ritz at the Bourse