Style over substance

Rating: 6/10 (9 August 2004)

Let me start by saying that I generally like "feel-bad movies" and I liked "Pi". This movie, however, completely failed to work for me.
I think the main problem is that this movie tries too hard. It tries too hard to carry a serious message across and it tries to hard to be really artistic. In my opinion, the director loses himself in one gimmick (splitscreen, fast forward, curious editing) after another, and that really hurts the story and character development. All the fancy editing was probably done to create a surreal atmosphere similar to a drug trip, and it partly works, but a bit more restraint would have been welcome.
The first hour of this movie is a fairly boring. Sure, it looks great, but it's really going nowhere. We get to meet the characters, but we don't really get to know them. The things they do are fairly predictable and mundane, and the pace is rather slow. After the first hour, terrible things start happening to the main characters, but I had a hard time caring about any of them since they're so poorly fleshed out, and the things that happen to them are so extreme that it's hard to take them seriously. Ellen Burstyn does a wonderful job, but the other actors' performances are really not that special.
I admire the people who made this movie for making such a direct and tragic movie about a heavy subject, but this eventually I think this movie goes way overboard. With more focus on substance (characters and story) instead of style (flashy visuals) and a more subtle approach this movie might have worked. As it is now, it's still an interesting movie to watch, but definitely not a good one.