Mark Keresman, Bad Movie, August 2014

Third Person

In addition to ICON, Mark Keresman is a contributing writer for SF Weekly, East Bay Express, Pittsburgh City Paper, Paste, Jazz Review, downBeat, and the Manhattan Resident.

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Screenwriter Paul Haggis has churned out some good movies—Crash and Million Dollar Baby, most notably. His latest, Third Person, which he also directed, is not likely to join that company. It’s another of those movies featuring supposedly interlocking stories—you know, like Nashville, Short Cuts (if you’ve not seen it, I’ll save you three hours and tell you the point right now: people suck), Magnolia, and Crash. The problem with that is it sometimes can be a bit of a strain to “connect” the stories, and Third Person not only has that problem but a couple of others: Hammy acting, an over-written script, and mostly unappealing characters.

Liam Neeson plays a tormented novelist. We know he is tormented because of (surprise) the presence of empty wine bottles, stubbed-out cigarettes, photogenic three-day (OK, maybe two-day) facial stubble, and the way he slams his laptop computer shut in frustration. Despite the presence of his lover, played by Olivia Wilde, he’s tormented—another one of filmdom’s unhappy writers, despite his staying in a nice hotel room in Paris (France, not Texas) with a knock-out gal-pal. (Jeez, I wish I was that unhappy. But I digress.) That’s story one. Story two: Adrien Brody is the stereotypical Ugly American in Rome—those darn Eye-talians, why don’t they speak English like we do?—who gets involved with a damsel in distress, an exotic Romanian lady (is there any other kind in movies set in Europe?) whose daughter has been kidnapped…or has she? Three: Mila Kunis is a “fallen” actress working as a hotel maid and she’s fighting her ex, James Franco, a painter (we know this because we see him imitating Jackson Pollock) over child custody-type stuff. Common element in all three: A woman, either dysfunctional or “in trouble,” is making a man miserable or semi-miserable.

Third Person is one of those movies in which the viewer is constantly reminded that Actors—SERIOUS Actors, Are at Work. One can imagine the script reading: “PONDER, writer, and remove your glasses because that’s what people do when they ponder.” Brows are often furrowed, actresses emote with facial expressions as if in soap operas, characters gaze tellingly. We know these actors are Seriously Acting because of the portentous dialogue, rich in heavy-handed platitudes and writerly, archly “literary” vagueness. Example: One of the novelist’s character’s lines is read aloud: “White. The color of trust. It's the color of honesty. And the color of the lies he tells himself.” Uh-huh. I’ll bet his novel has a catchy title like “The Expatriate Tailor of Agronomy” or “Broken Wings Make the Least Noise.”

SPOILER ALERT: Third Person has one of “those” endings that feels like a cheat, one that negates most of what the viewer saw…namely, nearly none of it happened. Those stories that we saw? They were stories from the novelist’s book-in-progress, wherein the author was trying to exorcize his personal demons…or was it Haggis, a fugitive from Scientology, trying to do that?

The heart wants what it wants, but did it have to want such a lame movie? File under: Good cast (Maria Bello and Kim Basinger also appear), crummy script. By the way, Haggis used to write for the TV shows The Facts of Life, Walker, Texas Ranger, and Diff’rent Strokes. WHAchoo talkin’ ‘bout, Haggis?