By M. Faust

If there is anything good to be said for college fraternities, you won’t hear it in the new independent drama The Line. At least you won’t hear it in any persuasive manner.

Ambitious sophomore Tom Baxter (Alex Wolff), eager to get on the fast track away from his working class upbringing, is happy to spout the party line to freshman pledges: Kappa Nu Alpha is about tradition and history, with alumni that include US presidents and Fortune 500 executives.

That lofty self-image has little to do with the way these young men spend their time while enrolled at Sumpter College, somewhere in the mid-south. Classes are something that just gets in the way of drinking and skirt chasing. (Forgive the archaic phrase for an activity the lads describe in much cruder terms: the movie has more F-bombs than GoodFellas, less imaginatively employed.) 

Worst of the lot is Tom’s frat house roommate, Mitch Miller (Bo Mitchell), who makes the John Belushi character in Animal House look like Cary Grant. Mitch’s embarrassing behavior has been tolerated mostly because he’s a legacy with a rich father (John Malkovich). But as his frat brothers become more open in their disdain for him, Mitch looks around for someone he can bully in turn. And hey, isn’t what that freshmen pledges were designed for? 

The Line isn’t exactly packed with surprises, but writer-director Ethan Berger gives his feature debut enough punch to justify the familiar story. More than a screed against toxic masculinity, Berger’s film depicts the struggle of the have-nots to join the haves, not realizing until it’s too late how heavily the odds are stacked against them. Working with a cast of talented young actors, he gives us just enough ugliness to make his point without repelling us. Now playing at the Regal Elmwood. 

We Live in Time

The portentously titled We Live in Time appears to be the surprise hit of the fall, taking up screen space at just about every local theater—not bad for a movie that has no superheroes or bloodthirsting monsters.

Telling its story with random jumps through time, this British drama charts the relationship between Almut (Florence Pugh), a rising culinary star, and Tobias (Andrew Garfield), a corporate drone on the rebound from a failed marriage. The issue of whether to have kids—he’s pro, she isn’t—pales in the face of the film’s biggest hurdle, her diagnosis of cancer. 

This is not a spoiler: we’re informed of Almut’s illness early in the movie’s trajectory back and forth in time. It’s a tactic that isn’t quite as novel as the script by Nick Payne seems to think, and it serves mostly to disguise the threadbare nature of the story.

Even by the relaxed standards of screen romances, the story is contrived and occasionally inane: the meet-cute scene and the childbirth scene are right out of a sitcom, while the big dramatic conflict in the third act is handled no less preposterously.

I had hoped for more from director John Crowley, whose 2015 Brooklyn is one of my favorite movies of the past decade. It’s nice to know what audiences still have an appetite for romantic dramas, but they deserve better than this.