Seen: May 2nd, 2007
Format: DVD
Rating: 3
I don't get Zach Braff's popularity. I don't watch Scrubs, maybe that's the problem. I saw Garden State, which was interesting, but hardly magnificent. I guess the ladies like him, but I just can't see it. I won't say I dis-like him, but he's not a draw either.
The rest of the leads, however, could fall off the face of the earth for all I care.
It's a shame that the casting of this film ruined it for me before it ever really got started. Michael Weston bugs the crap out of me. I always type cast him in my head as "psycho stupid crying guy". Casey Affleck is at best a hack. Eric Christian Olsen's best turn has to be Beerfest. And why is Jacinda Barret popular? She's not particularly talented or stunning, though I guess a turn in School for Scoundrels will put her on the fast track. And while I like Tom Wilkinson and Blythe Danner well enough, the only performer in this film I'd go out of my way to see is Marley Shelton. She does a decent job, considering with what and whom she's working.
And that's the other thing. There's really nothing of substance here. It's like St. Elmo's Fire for the new millennium. There's a whole bunch of 29 year olds having mid-life crises. They're uniformly self-centered and narcissistic. They each learn the cold hard lesson that the world and the people in it are not designed to make them happy.
Duh.
There's simply nothing revelatory here. While they have separate problems, it's all the same issue, and the views aren't really divergent enough to make any of them interesting. Worse, all the situations are thinly defined. There's not enough detail in any of the relationships to make us believe that the problems have any foundation. Asking us to actually care about them is out of the question. I'm tempted here to write a litany of questions here to illustrate this, but I'm tired and once I started, I couldn't stop.
In addition, none of these characters is really sympathetic either. They're all just broken, most of them in dramatically unattractive ways. Are we supposed to believe that we're all this badly defective, and therefore deserving of tolerance and forgiveness no matter what our transgressions? Are we supposed to believe that it's OK to wallow in our own narcissism and that it doesn't matter what we do or who we hurt and long as we learn some lesson and feel better about our own situation?
Please.
There are few interesting bits in the film. There's a treehouse which a nice touch. The porch sequence is interesting, though I've read it was lifted from a German film. Danner and Ramis' scene is subtly tragic and nicely played.
I get the feeling that whoever wrote this was going through some crisis of discovery about their life. Maybe they looked around and found that people around them had some problems too. The mistake wasn't in writing about it. The mistake was in thinking that anyone, much less everyone else would really care.
The Good: I'm stymied
The Bad: 70s style Narcissism
The Ugly: The casting
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