Paul Haggis will forever be a director having to prove himself to the critical masses. It’s not his fault that his tangled-web racial drama, Crash, beat the far superior Brokeback Mountain to the Best Picture Oscar in 2005. He’s also the man who penned the best Bond film, Casino Royale, as well as Clint Eastwood awards knockout Million Dollar Baby.
His latest is another intricately, or depending on your perspective, confusing character tapestry which features a series of couples living out their own Venn diagram of crossed paths and colliding relationships.
At the centre of this narrative patchwork is Michael (Liam Neeson), a once successful writer who’s holed up in a hotel struggling to find the passion with which to imbue his writing. At the same time he’s conducting a turbulent affair with Anna (Olivia Wilde), an unhinged journalist seeking validation and comfort.
In other corners of the world, a fashion thief (Adrian Brody) becomes entangled in a ransom demand for the daughter of a beautiful Romanian immigrant (Moran Atias), a young mother (Mila Kunis) has had her daughter taken from her due to neglect, with the famous father (James Franco) taking legal action to prevent her from gaining any sort of access.
Skirting the periphery of the story there’s still enough room for Kim Basinger’s seemingly depressed housewife and Maria Bello’s hard nosed lawyer.
In terms of construct, this template is hardly an original one. Done well you end up with Magnolia, whilst executed adequately with overblown melodrama you get Haggis’s own Academy Award winning effort. Third Person falls well short of both with a ludicrous set of plot contrivances, the reason for which could well cause your brain to burst through sheer frustration.
The level of performance and patient desire to discover how all of these people’s lives will chain link together is completely undermined by one of the most frustrating WTF endings imaginable. Some will be perplexed, others angry, and maybe somewhere M. Night Shyamalan will give it an appreciative nod of the head. But as an audience you can’t help but feel underwhelmed by the “is that it?” nature of the conclusion.
Up until then you’ve been intrigued by the complexities of Neeson doing his brittle wardrobe routine, and Olivia Wilde, superb as a woman walking a tightrope of sanity, clinging onto their damaged union. It’s their thread which demands your attention, mainly thanks to a wholly unexpected turn of events that plunges an already destructive liaison into darker territory.
Counter that with the more frivolous pantomime exploits of Brody, who makes very little impression beyond a laughable sex scene, and the overwrought woes of an unsympathetic Kunis, and you have a very uneven level of quality and interest.
By no means terrible, Third Person is a sometimes enthralling, often eye-rolling film which lives and dies by its climactic ending.
‘Third Person’
Director: Paul Haggis
Starring: Liam Neeson, Olivia Wilde, Adrian Brody, Mila Kunis, Maria Bello, James Franco
Running time: 2 hours, 17 minutes
Release date: 14 Nov. 2014 (UK)
2 stars out of 5
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