Enough Said

How often do we look at the world through the eyes of others?

It’s a question I began to ask myself, oddly enough, after I watched a movie called Enough Said, a 2013 romantic comedy starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus and James Gandolfini. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll here refer to their characters as “Elaine” and “Tony Soprano,” respectively (and respectfully).

Elaine, a divorced masseuse with a teenage daughter, meets Tony Soprano at a party, who’s also divorced with a daughter the same age. Although she’s not attracted to him, Elaine agrees to go on a date with Tony, which goes surprisingly well. They fall in love, and a heart-warming relationship blooms.

At that same party, Elaine also meets a divorced poet named Marianne, and they become good friends. They spend their time together pouring over the details of their marriages, Marianne constantly laying out all the terrible qualities of her ex-husband. As it turns out, Marianne’s ex-husband is none other than Tony Soprano.

When Elaine figures this out, realizing that the man she’s been hearing so much about, the man with so many detestable qualities, she isn’t sure what to do. She says nothing to Marianne, nor to Tony; instead, she continues learning about Tony, her perception of him growing increasingly coloured by the stories Marianne keeps telling her. Still haunted by her failed marriage, she begins to rely on Marianne’s judgment about Tony, trying to protect herself from another failed love.

Soon, Elaine gets so fixated on Tony’s supposed flaws - flaw, of course, according Marianne - that she no longer even sees the man she’d fallen in love with. She begins to nag him about the things that annoyed Marianne to the point that it puts a great strain on the relationship. Eventually, Tony finds out that Elaine and Marianne are friends, that Elaine has been hiding this from the start, and that Elaine’s view of him has been tainted by Marianne the whole time. Feeling betrayed, he breaks up with her. In the end, however, they reconcile and live happily every after.

Now when it was over, I couldn’t tell whether it was a good movie or not. I wasn’t sure how much I liked it. Overall, it was an enjoyable enough experience; the acting, without question, was brilliant; but there were a few subplot that I felt were thrown in without much development, and ultimately, I wasn’t sure if the situation - that is, Elaine lying to Tony about being friends with Marianne - was serious enough to carry the emotional weight of the story.

As I tried to clarify my thoughts on the film, I started reading some of the reviews, thinking I’d find them to be as mixed as my own, but the ones I found were overwhelming positive, making me wonder if I hadn’t been paying closing enough attention as I watched.

Then I did what it seems like we all do now: I asked Chat GPT: “Is Enough Said (2013) a good movie?” It said:

Yes — Enough Said (2013) is a genuinely good movie, and not just “pleasant” or “nice.” It’s good in a quiet, adult, unusually honest way, which is why it tends to stick with people who see it at the right moment in their lives.

“You know what,” I said to myself. “The more I think about it, it was a genuinely good movie.”

As the final verdict formed in my mind, I realized that by relying on other people’s reviews, and above all, by relying on AI to decide whether it was a good movie, I had done exactly what Elaine did to Tony Soprano: withhold judgment on the movie until I could filter it through someone else’s perspective.

How often do we not trust our own judgment? And how often do we need to see the world through someone’s else’s point of view before coming to our conclusion about it? And why?

Just like Elaine, we probably do this to protect ourselves. And in many cases, it may be the most prudent thing to do. But if Elaine had listened to Marianne and not followed her own heart, she may have closed the door to true love. At the same time, trusting her own judgment, looking at through world solely through her own eyes, was nonetheless a risk, as she painfully learned during her first marriage.

But it’s a risk we sometimes have to take, perhaps especially in pursuit of the Ultimate.