Glorious Images, Fractured story telling.

Rating: 3/10 (17 July 2006)

I could not force myself to watch this film in its entirety. I think I made it about 45 minutes in. Despite many fine actors, esp. the always interesting Jeff Bridges, who brings a layered sadness to many of his roles, I simply could not connect and did not care about these people.
It was this huge budget American movie shorthand: we're supposed to care because we've been given a snippit of a scene that reminds us of something else, but it just doesn't work for me. If I don't care this far into the movie, it just won't happen.
Visually beautiful, and sky high production values on costumes and sets, it is wasted in these disjointed storytelling. Whoever cast the extras has wonderful faces, which the cinematographer and editor took full advantage of, but why don't we get faces like that in the major characters. Of course Chris Cooper has that kind of face, but many others (esp. all the "size 2 women" in the supporting roles)seem to have stepped out of a commercial.
The Chicago tribune called this film "sleek and beautiful." I will completely agree with that, but so are music videos. I kept asking myself, what is wrong, what is misfiring? I really wanted to like it. Some of it is the short-hand story telling, but the look was almost too pretty. When the cinematography is this gorgeous, you want and need to linger on something smaller and deeper, or really take all the time you need to connect with something bigger -a mini-series.
Ultimately, I began wondering if the original length was much longer, and it was cut down so much that it became fractured, and if that is the case, my apologies to the director. This is the kind of film that makes me ponder, what is it that European film-makers "get" that we lose in our big budget studio films? Is the system itself hurting some films, by sanitizing and conforming them, when they need to stick out like an unruly horse's nose at the starting gate?
Very beautiful, but no connection, and not satisfying... well, that's a lot of things in Hollywood in a nutshell, isn't it?