BEFORE: Usually, my February is spent not only watching movies daily, but also tracking the annual countdown of "100 Days of Oscar" on TCM. Not this year, because the Oscar ceremony is taking place later than usual - it's scheduled for April 25. So TCM isn't starting their Oscar chain until April 1, and honestly, that's a bit of a relief for me. I suddenly remembered about it last night and thought that maybe I'd missed 17 days of it already!
Whatever the format is in any given year, TCM (like me) usually ends up watching romance-themed films on and around Valentine's Day, which is easy because there are just so many films about love and romance! Sure, it gets a little harder each year for me to make my links, but I've found that for the month of February, my programming gets a little bit easier, at least in some ways. If I'm stuck for a link, just add more films, and more links will appear! Or, I can always go up and down the list of IMDB credits for each actor, and I'll probably find another romance somewhere in somebody's resumé...
Anyway, the Oscars are coming (eventually) and so is TCM's Oscar-themed block, we all just have to wait a bit longer. We should be used to that by now - at least the Oscars aren't cancelled, just delayed. Let's hope by next year they're back on the old timetable, or maybe they'll work their way back to it gradually - I know for the last decade or so, the Oscars show has been creeping up earlier and earlier, kind of like how the Super Bowl used to be in January, but as they kept adding more levels of playoffs, now we've come to expect it in February.
Maria Bello carries over again from "The Jane Austen Book Club".
THE PLOT: Three interlocking love stories involving three couples in three cities: Rome, Paris and New York.
AFTER: Warning, SPOILERS AHEAD for the ending of "Third Person" - turn back now if you plan on seeing this film in the future.
Well, as Tom Petty once sang, "Some days are diamonds, some days are rocks." I often think that through my system, some movies are bricks and some are just mortar - the mortar ones don't end up meaning a lot to me, except that they do hold the bricks together. For a round-numbered day like this, signifying that I'm halfway to being one-third done with Movie 13 (I guess this means the year is one-sixth over already) I'd hoped to land on a brick, but it's just not one of those. This movie is all over the place, hard to understand and intentionally cryptic - and any possible explanation for what, exactly, is taking place feels like it will ultimately fall short.
It's another film like yesterday's, one that intertwines several stories together, and then feels like a juggling routine, trying to keep every ball up in the air or in motion as it toggles between the different storylines - but at least with "Jane Austen Book Club" all the characters came together at least once a month and interacted, they had shared experiences and inhabited the same city, and thus they shared a universe - but with this film, the shared universe is very much in doubt. For starters, the three stories take place in different cities - New York, Paris and Rome, so how could they possibly interact?
I should have paid a bit more attention to who the director here is - it's Paul Haggis, who followed a similar formula (umm, I think?) with the film "Crash", which ended up winning the Best Picture Oscar in 2006, but I think that's commonly regarded in the rearview as one of the more controversial winners, perhaps it even was the wrong choice for that year. What should have won? Maybe "Brokeback Mountain", but maybe Hollywood wasn't ready for that yet. "Capote"? I don't know. Maybe I'm confusing things with the year that "Shakespeare in Love" somehow beat out "Saving Private Ryan"...
Anyway, as disjointed as I remember "Crash" being, this is much, much worse in that regard. There's so much jumping between the three stories that each one only gets a few minutes, sometimes even less than a minute, before we jump to another one of the stories, and that can be quite disconcerting. Why couldn't they run the three stories consecutively, and give each one the time it needed to find its own pace, like Tarantino did with "Pulp Fiction"? Ah, because somebody here wanted to be "arty" and highlight the connections, the similarities between the three stories. The tagline on my cable box menu says that the three stories are about a new love, a relationship that's somewhere in the middle, and one that's in the past. But I don't think that's the right formula for determining what's really going on here.
One story is about a writer, and he's working out of a Paris hotel room, when he's visited by his assistant/mentee/lover, and they start playing these little relationship head games. I can't tell if they were just supposed to be role-playing, messing with each other in a cutesy kind of way, or if their relationship mixed in a fair amount of contention with the affection. And we the audience aren't given much time to really analyze it, because before long, we're whisked away to the other story taking place in New York.
In New York, an ex-soap opera actress is starting as a hotel maid, because she needs to prove that she's stable and can hold down a steady job. Through conversations with her lawyer, we learn that there was some kind of incident involving her son, who's now living with his father, and she needs to prove her mental capacity or stability in order to be granted some form of custody or visitation. We're also shown scenes of a painter interacting with his son, and only later do we find out that painter used to be married to the actress-turned-maid. But again, we don't have much time to consider this, before we're whisked away again to...
Rome, where an American businessman is having trouble getting around town in a taxi and ordering a beer in a bar. (NITPICK POINT - who goes to a foreign country without at least bringing a phrase book. Also, who doesn't know that "birra" is Italian for "beer" and how to say "please" and "thank you" in Italian? This seems like very basic stuff.) He talks to a woman in that bar who leaves without her bag, and then later after he tries to do the right thing, he's drawn into her world of paying off a man who's smuggled her daughter into the country.
The film continues bouncing between the three stories for what seems like a very long time, before hinting at the ways in which the characters from the three stories, in three different cities, might be connected. Oddly, all of the stories also share a specific element, which is three different accidents involving small children. That's too much of a coincidence to dismiss lightly, and possibly that's a hint to what's really going on here. But after viewing, I read several interpretations online regarding what is real here, and what might not be. Silly, I suppose, because in the end, none of this is real, they're all just stories. Or maybe they're one big story, that exists in the mind and in the manuscript of the author character. (Aren't we all just characters that exist in the manuscript of the Author?)
Again, several interpretations are possible. One is that the author's story is real, and one or both of the other stories are from the book he is writing. But other answers are possible, you'll have to watch the film and choose the reality that you prefer best, I suppose. Some of the characters dissipate at the end, like superheroes killed by Thanos, and this could mean that the author has removed them from the book to make the story stronger - but other answers are also potentially legitimate.
I started to feel the reality of the situation fold in on itself when one character in the New York hotel writes something down on a piece of note paper, but accidentally leaves it behind when she leaves the room. We don't see who is staying in that room, but during a later scene set in the Paris hotel, someone finds that same note, flips it over and writes something else on the other side. Huh? How did the paper teleport from New York to Paris? This can't be a simple mistake, because it's kind of an important plot point that the NY woman doesn't have this piece of paper - because it's now in Paris? This means something, I guess, but also, it just doesn't make any sense. Yet the plot proceeds as if nothing has gone wrong. Then this happens AGAIN later in the film with the white flowers - they're in the Paris hotel, then somehow they're also in the NY hotel. It can't be a mistake, but it's also not possible - unless nothing in the entire film is real and is all just someone's dream or novel idea.
Sure, it's all ultimately about love and betrayal - but I ended up with more questions than answers. If nothing was real, what about the scenes where the author was talking to the book agent about the story he's writing, were those "real"? What about the interplay between Michael and Anna, if they love each other, why do they play these mind games and pretend to hate each other? Or do they hate each other and fool around anyway? That was very confusing. Which accident involving a small child was real, and which were merely symbolic? And was the author ever really in Paris, or was he in Rome all the time?
Reading the Trivia section on IMDB now, apparently there are a few "misplaced" items that jump between the cities, and I only caught one of them. But you know what, I don't like being tricked, not even by a film director, and I resent the attempts here to trick me with what is and isn't "real", if that word even means anything any more. But asking why the director wanted to mess with the audience? I might as well just ask why the director seemed to hate his own characters so much, he clearly didn't want any of them to ever be happy. And just what does that prove?
Also starring Liam Neeson (last seen in "Seraphim Falls"), Olivia Wilde (last seen in "The Next Three Days"), Moran Atias (ditto), James Franco (last seen in "Alien: Covenant"), Mila Kunis (last seen in "The Spy Who Dumped Me"), Adrien Brody (last seen in "The Singing Detective"), Kim Basinger (last seen in "The Nice Guys"), Caroline Goodall (last seen in "Hunter Killer"), David Harewood (last seen in "Blood Diamond"), Riccardo Scamacio (last seen in "John Wick: Chapter 2"), Loan Chabanol, Patrick Duggan, Katy Louise Saunders, Oliver Crouch, Daniela Virgilio, Fabrizio Biggio, Vinicio Marchioni, Vincent Riotta (last seen in "Under the Tuscan Sun"), Michele Melega, Michael Margotta.
RATING: 3 out of 10 broken cell phones
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