Beautiful clichÃ©s

Rating: 4/10 (19 April 2017)

A very polished and ambitious film, Mr Nobody does in an unnecessarily complicated way what other films have done a lot better. I'm thinking for example of Medem's Lovers of the Arctic Circle (the step-brother / sister arc is more or less the same) or of Lepage's Possible Worlds.
Yes, Van Dormael knows how to charm his audience with beautiful images and profound existential themes that will make spectators feel intelligent, but he will only touch these themes in the most shallow way, to such a point that his film could be perceived as an accumulation of ideas and images that go all over the place without anything among them remotely resembling a thought, and certainly not an original thought. I am reminded of another annoying seemingly- profound filmmaker who's films also lack cohesion: Claude Lelouch.
The choice of Jared Leto as a protagonist doesn't help the film to seem more profound: the pretty actor remains skin-deep and seems to have no idea what a real human with an inner life might look like.