FILMBRATS - REVIEWS

Dan sees Alice get hit by a car. He sees that she makes it to the hospital and back okay. They fall in love. He writes a book about her. He’s photographed for the book by Anna. He falls in love with her. Anna falls in love with Larry. Larry was the subject of a practical joke that leads him to her. Larry falls in love with Anna. The resulting love square complicates their lives and everything gets a bit too personal. It becomes hard to distinguish the truth from the lies and even harder to discern who can be trusted and what actions will be taken next.

Patrick Marber wrote the screenplay based off of his own stage play. The dialogue contained within is some of the most compelling to hear delivered. It’s how you wish you could talk. The flow and the creativity and the back and forth works very naturally on the screen, but you’d be hard pressed to find people that actually talk in this manner on a regular basis. There aren’t awkward pauses and everyone knows exactly what to say at just the right moment. It’s flawless, which makes it imperfect and unreal. But it’s still very interesting to watch, and I admire the style.

The most interesting thing about the movie is that the action happens off camera. The film spans nearly 5 years of their lives. The only way you know time has passed is that they make reference to it while talking to each other. You aren’t left in the dark about the time changes for very long at all. The situation is not treated like a mystery. However, all the lying, cheating and deceit happens during the unseen transitions. As a result, you never fully know who’s being honest in a particular situation. Yet, I still tended to take everyone at his or her word for whatever reason. The film seemed brutally honest, even though there was always a chance that the entire thing was a lie.

With the good comes the bad. Okay, not bad, but kinda lame. The ending got really trite really fast. It began to lose me with the way it attempted to revisit memories and themes and everything that goes along with such things. It seemed hokey and too typically storybook. However, leave it to director Mike Nichols to end it on a redeeming note. It’s no coincidence most of his movies are critically acclaimed. There’s just something about the very last shot of the movie that wraps it all up for me. The whole timeframe of the movie makes much more sense based on this one simple shot.

While I don’t think the film is mind-blowingly original or innovative, it still works. The performances are great. The script works in an unusually poetic way. The film simply resonates.

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