Like a caricature of a “Best Picture Oscar Winner”… all the signifiers are here. A complete, pristinely-polished exercise in navel contemplation. Every performance screams, “ACTING!”, every soliloquy screams “DRAMATIC WRITING!”, the cinematography screams, “CINEMATOGRAPHY!” Despite some good feints in which it appears to be about to descent into complete cliche and then doesn’t, nonetheless it’s as pretentious as they come, wearing it’s “great movie” aspirations on its sleeves, without ever actually saying anything that I could relate to or care about… as perhaps best exemplified by totally unnecessary “look what I can do!” technical exercise of making most of the movie look like one long continuous shot, as if “gee whiz” factor is a substitute for entertainment. All the pretense even renders the extremely cool solo-drumming-only soundtrack into complete contrived artifice, in this context. Granted, complete contrived artifice /can/ work, but it still has to say something. Here, it doesn’t. The little bits of magical realism, like his never-commented-on telekinetic abilities, don’t help, either. I bet the people who love this also loved “Being John Malkovich”, another film that pulls the rug out from under itself by trying waaaaaay too hard.
