the odd couple

Rating: 6/10 (27 December 2015)

I've often felt recently that society is slowly pushing single men to the fringes. But this unusual art house stylised film, populated by actors who are usually very mainstream, takes that idea to the extreme.
There are similarities with Being John Malkovich in sheer weirdness of the conceit, but there is also a strong feeling, mirrored by the jagged music that this is a film that wants to join the indie crowd, but wasn't born to it. This is made by someone who loves Jonze, Anderson, Gondry, Iñárritu etc - but like Gilliam hasn't quite mastered getting a great treatment to a strong draft.
The problem first comes with the tone, which is played differently throughout the cast. Olivia Colman's Hotel Manager strikes an almost perfect absurdest humour, but then Ben Wishaw plays it almost totally straight. Farrell keeps to a low key with some nice notes of humour but doesn't really fill the screen. There are moments of embarrassing terror, and these leave the audience a bit perplexed next to lighter touches.
And then the film just has pacing problems and feels longer than it should do. In some respects the film is easy to criticize because the ideas are so strong, but there just wasn't enough work put into it to complete the vision properly.