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‘Bad Behaviour’ Review: Jennifer Connelly Finds No Rest on a Spiritual Retreat In Alice Englert’s Needling Debut
Alice Englert's debut 'Bad Behaviour' is full of arresting, angular scenes, most of them built around Jennifer Connelly's turbulent performance.
At first the film alternates the stories of Lucy and her adult daughter Dylan (played by Englert herself) to form a bifurcated portrait of women whose desires are increasingly incompatible with their chosen environment; once it brings the characters together, for a study of wary family bonding under dire circumstances, it loses its crisp dramatic and thematic definition. “Bad Behaviour” is notable, too, as an unusually rangy and risky showcase for Connelly, an actor who may have recently scored career-high box office in “Top Gun: Maverick,” but whose pensive, nervy screen presence has been too rarely tested by Hollywood in the two decades since she won an Oscar for “A Beautiful Mind.” Here, she’s subtly but vividly agitated from the jump, already bristling with quiet malaise and discomfort in her own skin when we meet her driving to Oregon, calling Dylan from the car to warn her that she’s going to be out of reach for, well, however long a paid-for epiphany takes to arrive. Beginning as passive-aggressive before the “passive” part is rather boldly chipped away, this flinty, often very funny standoff between the two women gives Lucy’s half of the narrative a snap and tension that Dylan’s, mostly revolving around her tentative romance with unavailable actor Elmore (Marlon Williams), lacks.
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