I Want To Love This Film, But I Can't

Rating: 5/10 (4 January 2010)

Ever since seeing Jaco Van Dormael's Le Huitième Jour (The Eighth Day) I had been highly looking forward to his latest work....MR NOBODY. Last night I caught an early screening of it in Liege, Belgium with special guest, director Jaco Van Dormael in attendance.
I tried so hard to get into Mr Van Dormael's brilliant, yet fatally flawed vision of love, life and the choices we make. My first problem of the film is its structure (flashforwards, flashbacks..). The film rarely gave me the opportunity to sit back and immerse myself in its world without constantly jolting, and distracting with its fractured structure. I understand this was to show how every choice has its consequence, every choice leads down a different life path. It often reminded me of the more mainstream and simple chick-flick SLIDING DOORS, which my wife adored. I loved the film for its ideas and questions it posed on who and what we are. MR NOBODY certainly can't be criticized for being empty or shallow. If anything, the problem with the film is that there is too much to consider. It's overblown and bloated which ended up numbing me to the point of not even caring.
Van Dormael clearly loves the use of color in his films. In THE EIGHTH DAY his use of color was beautiful and poignant in the way it illuminated its troubled young hero's fantastic world, in contrast to the gray realities of the true world around him. That is another one of my major problems with MR NOBODY. This film had so much to say about who and what we are. It dealt with such real issues of abandonment, loss and loneliness, but his Tim Burtonesque use of colors and over-the-top jests didn't slightly resemble anything real or believable. If only he had given the film some sense of the real world from time to time, like with The Eighth Day it would have strengthened the film tremendously. Something has to look and feel real in order to feel any emotion or anything at all.
I just wish Jaco Van Dormael had simplified things a bit. I don't mean dumb down his vision, but give it some space to breath and room to move the viewer. As I said before, I really wanted to love this film, but now I can say I really didn't like it. MR NOBODY was a bold effort with a lot of good in it, including the fine cast, but in the end unfortunately it falls rather flat.