Yet, as writer-director Tom DiCillo shows in his quirky and funny new film, it's not a terminal condition.
People survive their own idiocy, though there are inevitably victims along the way.
DiCillo, who wrote and directed last year's engagingly offbeat Box of Moonlight and 1995's hilarious Living in Oblivion , expands his purview from smaller, more contained films. Here, he tells a sprawling and interconnected story about the difference between what people think they want and what they really need. He has peopled his screenplay with a half-dozen characters who go chasing after ridiculous dreams when, as Dorothy observed, their heart's desire was right there in their own back yard. An inveterate womanizer, Bob thinks he will achieve happiness when he finally finds a woman who is a real blonde - as opposed to the bottled kind he usually encounters. He affects a snobbish attitude toward working on a soap, then desperately agrees to a one-day job in a Madonna video.