Reviews

I hate this film intensely, but instead of getting caught up in emotion, I will attempt to express myself in a civil manner. The trouble with this film is that it's ultimately uncinematic. It is not a movie, but more a riddle, where everything, every little detail is something to be deciphered. As a consequence, there is no immediacy to anything, and as the movie progresses, every remnant of emotional continuity is sacrificed and reduced to seemingly random utterances, obscure references and a Pauline Kael review quoted verbatim by the main character. I'm not saying it doesn't make intellectual sense. Charlie Kaufman writes his scripts with a very specific meaning in mind, and that is in my opinion his greatest flaw. He gets so caught up in his own cleverness, in the convoluted architecture of the plot, that all emotion often becomes numb in the service of some intellectual gimmick. This movie is certainly the worst offender in that regard. The strength of the film medium is its elegance, the ability to contain multitudes in a single scene. When you make something so overwrought as this, you could might as well write a philosophical treatise. There is no elegance, no simplicity in the storytelling and concepts are thrown at the viewer in a never-ending flood of information. The direction is clunky, with camera angles appearing out of nowhere and the editing is strangely hyperactive. And If I have to read the book to understand the movie, it has no right to be a movie.