Hollow and miserable.

Rating: 1/10 (11 January 2012)

Well, this was just a giant chore. Marion Cotillard does her best and it's a very impressive transformation on her part, stripping away all of her elegance to dive into this character, but I've rarely seen a film so miserably directed. Olivier Dahan takes what must have been an interesting life and somehow turns it into two of the most brutally trying hours I've had in my life. I was so tempted to throw in the towel on this one many times, but was determined to stick it out.
Unfortunately it never got better and things just became more melodramatic and less and less interesting. The structure is all over the place, jumping from time to time (to some other time, I think?) with no reason or rhythm. The whole thing is absolutely incomprehensible, to the point where I didn't know who half the characters were or what stage of her life we were at or what was even going on half the time. Absolutely ridiculous. Worse, they take this person and turn her into such a loathsome creature, there wasn't a moment where I was even interested in her.
It felt like they were so desperate to bring out sympathy or empathy from the audience, but it was such a miserably hollow experience the whole way through. I love Cotillard to death and the physical transformation is impressive, but I can't praise her performance too much if I never even cared about this dreadful person for the entire two hours that I was forced to sit through her wretched life. A good physical work, but I was never able to feel anything.