This might be great. Maybe.

Rating: 8/10 (4 December 2014)

It's been a few weeks since I've seen this and it keeps sticking in my mind, which is normally a sign that you've seen something great. However with this, even though I keep thinking about it, the more I do the more I seem to come down to the idea that maybe I didn't like it as much as I could have, or maybe I didn't like the point of it.
The film is fantastic to watch, the acting is great, the dialogue is mostly decent, the direction is brilliant. The whole thing is meant to look like it's one shot and it's done well. The camera movement is always interesting and substantive, and I'm amazed when I think about how much planning and blocking and overall thought must have gone into shooting the film the way they did, it's really amazing.
My problem is more with the story, or maybe the thematic elements, I'm not sure they hold up to scrutiny. This is a film about shallow people, which is fine, but even with this as a topic I think you need to dive into some sort of depth of character. There are times when the film does this in ways that are at least interesting, if not all that deep,but it never does anything conclusive with these explorations.
Towards the end of the film, Riggin, the main character,is going off the deep end, but we get less and less of his character as he does this. We get the idea that he is retreating into his shallow obsessions more and more, retreating into fantasy until it consumes him in a way. This is almost played for laughs, which could be brilliant in a way, if you could sense the underlying tragedy, but I'm not sure you get that. Instead you get these fantastical attempts at some kind of meta narrative, some grand conclusion that I don't think the film has really earned, so it falls kind of flat.
But I might be missing something. The film certainly gives you ideas to think about, and like I said it's very absorbing and entertaining, I'm just not sure what it all adds up to, and the more I look at it, the more I'm skeptical.
But ultimately this is all kind of nitpicking, and though the film both invites and deserves this sort of analysis, I don't think that you can write it off just because of these things. It's ambitious and in many ways well done, and it deserves to e seen at least once, even if it doesn't emerge as something greater than its parts (if it in fact doesn't)