There's an amusing attempt to drab down Courteney Cox in November, Greg Harrison's psychological thriller about a woman who can't seem to recover from the fatal shooting of her boyfriend (James Le Gros) during the robbery of a corner grocery. The former 'Friends' star has lopped off her hair ' a few inches, anyway. Plus, she's found this pair of glasses that no aspiring movie actress would be caught dead in. But she may not be enough of an actress herself to carry us through this puzzle box of a movie. With titles drawn from those KÃbler-Ross stages of grief ' Denial, Despair, Acceptance ' the movie's fractured narrative keeps returning to the scene of the crime, altering our sense of what exactly happened. Was Cox's Sophie, a photography instructor with an eye for detail, waiting in the car? Or was she with her boyfriend until the very end?
That's just one of the mysterious questions in a movie that takes us deep inside the mind of someone who may be experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder. Or maybe she's in shock. Made in 15 days for a mere $150,000, November can seem like bargain-basement David Lynch at times. But Harrison, who also edited the movie, knows how to stretch a dollar, using techniques drawn from experimental films to convey the synaptic breakdown of a woman upon whom guilt ' Sophie'd been having an affair ' has taken a toll. It's not like Cox is an embarrassment or anything. You can sense her digging in her attic for something to pin her performance on. And the scenes of just Sophie in her apartment are creepy in that Lynchian way. But when things really start to go bad, it's kind of like watching Monica veer down Mulholland Drive.
