Watch The Reunion 2011 Online
The Cleary brothers, Sam (John Cena), Leo (Ethan Embry) and Douglas (Boyd Holbrook) take dysfunctional families to a new level: Sam and Leo have grown up hating each other and neither likes their juvenile kid brother, Douglas, to whom they’ve only recently been introduced. The three boys share the same father, but all have different mothers. Their father died a rich man and when they’re brought together by their sister Nina (Amy Smart) to learn which one of them will inherit the old man’s fortune, they are handed an unpleasant surprise. A requirement of the will is that the three estranged siblings go into business together as bail bondsmen. Their first job takes them into the mountains of Mexico where they encounter a drug lord and uncover a kidnapping plot, masterminded by an embittered entrepreneur (Michael Rispoli) that will endanger them all.
“Reunion” assembles a fictional pack of Yale alumni in a swanky Manhattan conference room to discuss their lives, loves and careers, and to disabuse one another frankly of their insecurities and ego trips. They were, once upon an undergraduate time, members of a secret society whose “program” entails biographical confession followed by blunt group analysis. Edging up on middle age, they are now more or less rich, neurotic and disillusioned. This scenario — hyperarticulate people shut in a room yapping at one another — suggests a movie adapted from the stage, as do the over-deliberate cadences, rhetorical set pieces and compressed, rather contrived emotional intensity of the drama.
Written and directed by Alan Hruska, himself a Yale graduate (and a playwright) who participated in a similar program, “Reunion” overflows with catharsis — at least for those on screen. This may not be quite the moment to solicit our sympathy for self-absorbed beneficiaries of Ivy League privilege. Sex, success, resentment and regret are on everyone’s mind. The linchpin of the assembly is a trial lawyer and novelist named Jake (Brett Cullen), who moderates the proceedings and whose wife, dead some 10 years, is a source of unspoken tension among the group. The members of the rest of the cast relish their chance to showboat without the usual distractions of a narrative feature.

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Written and directed by Alan Hruska; director of photography, Learan Kahanov; edited by Peter Frank; music by Eric V. Hachikian; produced by Petina Cole, Jonathan Gray and Matt Tauber. At the Quad Cinema, 34 West 13th Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. This film is not rated. WITH: Brett Cullen (Jake), Zoe McLellan (Averil), Derek Cecil (Stanley), Sam Coppola (Max), Alice Evans (Minerva) and Anna Khaja (Anna).
In Reunion, a group of friends from Yale reunite after 20 years to assess the damage. This juicy premise–contrasting present realities with undergrad dreams–has been famously explored in The Big Chill and Return of the Secaucus Seven and in novels galore, pulp and literary. However, despite some comic moments and sassy quips, this current outing about fortyish types who went to college in the ’80s feels leaden, maladroit and inauthentic.
Chief instigator is Jake (Brett Cullen), a successful trial lawyer, who stages the reunion in the conference room of his glitzy law firm. He is honoring the wishes of his wife Janie–the It girl of the group–who died ten years ago and requested the meeting for reasons never made clear, but presumably so Jake can disclose her big secret. Also on hand: Jake’s much-younger girlfriend Averil (Zoe McClellan), who’s got tough competition in the dead wife; a stereotypical Jewish doctor (Josh Pais) and his wife (wonderful stage actress Jessica Hecht, misused here); a mogul (David Thornton) with a private plane and a girlfriend called Minerva (Alice Evans), the name itself fair warning; a semi-recovering alcoholic (Jamey Sheridan) and his wife (Cynthia Stevenson), a disgruntled novelist. Throw in a bold-face journalist and a talent agent, both equally unpleasant, and you’ve got the main players. The only fun guy in this lineup is an aspiring actor working in security at Jake’s posh firm, who hits on the talent agent to advance his career.
Janie has apparently requested that the friends recreate their “program” from their Yale “secret society” (think Skull and Bones). In a cross between confession and group therapy, the members take turns accounting for their lives and assessing one another, sometimes brutally. The weekend encounters ratchet up the intensity, old rivalries and longings, and the pressure mounts for Jake to spill why Janie wanted everyone to meet. But unless I missed something, why is never clarified and the big reveal is a dud. Hruska means to implicate the friends in some way for Janie’s derailment, but fails to make the case, which renders the reunion a voyeuristic exercise. True, there are some telling quips: “You’re just the same guy with a lot of toys” and the weird comment, “You’ll have diapers, school admissions, chemo–all the things that make you feel alive.