Le Week-End

Protocol dictates that you get about a year to send a wedding gift before the couple can write you off – unless you’re Jeff Goldblum. The actor offers yet another lightly variegated brand of himself in Le Week-End, arriving in time to deliver a fine late present to an English couple in Paris to celebrate-slash-mourn their 30th wedding anniversary.

The marrieds, Nick and Meg, come to France weary and bickering. Their sharpest barbs glow hot with exasperation, turning a thin catalog of grievances into a tinderbox. The director is Roger Michell, though, so this isn’t a four-alarm fire. The Notting Hill director, working from novelist Hanif Kureishi’s screenplay (the pair also collaborated on The Mother and Venus), keeps things pretty and light, flattering his actors even when calling on them to simper more than simmer.

And the actors are Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan. Broadbent, especially when delivering a toast late in the movie, gets to do his big-eyed thing, all pathos and mischief; Duncan can stop a train with a squint. Both are so offhand in their brilliance that they’re easy to take for granted. They’re so good, in fact, that it’s easy to miss their characters’ real problem: They don’t take each other for granted.

For a lesson on how to turn that marital agony back into an asset, anyone committed to another person should bump into Goldblum in the City of Light, ideally followed by cinematographer Nathalie Durand. If travel is out of the budget (as it should have been for Nick and Meg), there’s always this witty, Bande à Part-quoting movie and its deus ex Goldblum, a gently satisfying lagniappe to those couples who remember that they’re really on the same side after all.