Made in 2008 and starring Paul Dano post Little Miss Sunshine and There Will Be Blood and Zooey Deschanel pre Yes Man and 500 Days of Summer, I’d hoped for more but this turned out to be a very average version of all those films about two quirky (slightly crazy) people bored with their lives and trying to find their place in the city who collide in a messy relationship while their dysfunctional families exist only to offer a dash of extra quirkiness for them to play off and to keep us interested.
Given that this is a film that has been made and remade over and over (mostly) by young, American and male film-makers, this version doesn’t really bring anything new or interesting in the way that some others do.
The two main characters, particularly “Happy”, don’t feel developed enough and so I ended up feeling they were quite inaccessible to me and therefore didn’t really engage with their fates. This, the jumpy plot that takes us from one quirky indie set-piece to the next with scarce continuity and the random guy who, for completely unexplained reasons, appears throughout the film to try to kill Paul Dano left me, by the end, with my own sense of queasiness and ennui to match those of the film’s main characters!
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