After first exploring the seedy underbelly of American life with 2001's scuzzy, John Cassavettes-inspired Virgil Bliss, writer-director Joe Maggio and lead actors Clint Jordan and Kirsten Russell reunite to explore a more genteel but still Cassavettes-derived form of urban despair with Milk And Honey. The film documents one long, dark night of the soul for Jordan, a mercurial stockbroker perilously off his medication, and his desperately unhappy wife, played by Russell. After a party gone horribly awry, they split up, embarking on parallel journeys of self-discovery.
Jordan first visits his mistress, only to find her with another man; he then tries to get a surly, hulking African-American man (Dudley Findlay Jr.) to kill him and make it look like a suicide gone awry. Russell, meanwhile, hooks up with a hairy young buck (Anthony Howard) who's so comically oversensitive that he's reduced to anguished sobs when his performance-art piece involving jumping around naked while wearing an animal mask isn't warmly received. Milk And Honey initially cops moves straight out of the Cassavettes-wannabe playbook, kicking off with a series of shrill scenes in which nerves are perpetually frayed, voices are loud and angry, and nearly everyone seems eager to initiate painful conflicts rather than avoid them. Maggio's thespians boast considerable chops—like Virgil Bliss, this is an actor's showcase first and foremost—but the net effect of all that secondhand intensity is tiring and fake. For its first half at least, Milk And Honey's subtitle should read "big scenes for actors," since that's almost exclusively what Maggio seems to be going for creatively.
As it heads into its superior second half, however, Milk And Honey grows less numbingly intense and more relaxed. Howard, for one, comes off as an inspired parody of an archetypal Cassavettes misfit, and there's a nice vein of quirky, minor-key humor running through his one-night stand with Russell, as when she consents to have sex with him largely to shut him up. Once Milk And Honey stops lurching after huge, actorly moments of near-psychotic intensity, it loosens up and actually gets around to telling a reasonably compelling human story.