"Mr. Nobody" is about nothing but encompasses everything

Rating: 7/10 (18 January 2011)

At the beginning of "Mr. Nobody" we meet Nemo Nobody in the future as an 118-year-old man and twice in the present as his 34-year-old self, but he doesn't know, and we don't know, which life is his. The rest of the film isn't so much about figuring out which life is actually real, but that all lives of right if you choose right.
It's about life, death, birth, and everything before, after and in-between. For as weird as it sounds, it is just as weird, but it's also a beautifully realized film with elegant shots, outstanding performances, and thought-provoking dialogue. "Mr. Nobody" embodies questions of fate, lectures on physics, and space travel to Mars—there's a good reason the film is two and a half hours long. And what film wouldn't be complete without multiple loves and three wives?
"Mr. Nobody" is a remarkable film because it pretty much accomplishes all of the aforementioned concepts. It's also a really long exercise in existential philosophy with a complete time-line of one man's life in multiple dimensions. The old Mr. Nobody makes statements saying that he's a nobody but his life has been everything, and, well, this film is nothing but also everything at the same time.