13 Conversations About One Thing Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)July 17th, 2002
IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
13 CONVERSATIONS ABOUT ONE THING
Directed by Jill Sprecher
Rated R, 102 minutes
In the early 1990s, aspiring filmmaker Jill Sprecher came to New York, and had her Midwestern sunniness doused with the cold water of a mugging and assorted other misfortunes. She was ready to give up on the human race as a bad lot until a random stranger smiled at her. Her faith was restored. This movie, her first feature, leads us down some of the labyrinthine passageways of the soul that she has traveled in reflecting on the human condition.
13 Conversations About One Thing is a worthwhile movie if only because it takes on a meaningful subject - the pursuit of happiness - and tries to give it a thoughtful and complex treatment. Unfortunately, it does so with a heavy, stilted self-importance. Sprecher has assembled a first rate cast, and then directed her actors as if they were doing a read-through. The dialogue (written with her sister Karen, with whom she wrote Clockwatchers) throbs with a stagy earnestness that flirts with self-parody: "What is it that you want?" "What everyone wants....to experience life, to wake up enthused, to be happy."
The One Thing around which this baker's dozen of conversations circles is Happiness. It is an elusive little butterfly, and one a man is never closer to losing than when he thinks he has it in his grasp. In a bar (at Happy Hour) Troy (Matthew McConaughey), a jaunty young Assistant DA, crows to a stranger that he is happy because "I sent a guilty man to prison today." The stranger, Gene (Alan Arkin) retorts "Show me a happy man, and I'll show you a disaster waiting to happen." It is a description that fits Troy like his Armani suit.
The Sprecher sisters have constructed their movie around four stories, which intersect at various times for various reasons. They've chopped them into thirteen segments, each introduced by a title lifted from the dialogue, and they've scrambled the time sequence with provocative randomness; the Happy Hour conversation, which comes at the beginning and recurs at the end of the movie, is the beginning of Troy's story, and the end of Gene's. Gene is the manager of an insurance claims department, a crusty grouch who can't stand the perpetual cheeriness of one of his adjusters (William Wise), whom he nicknames Smiley. A third story involves Walker (John Turturro), a physics professor who leaves his wife (Amy Irving) for a married literature colleague (Barbara Sukowa). Walker tends to quote laws of physics, particularly entropy: "Things can never go back to the way they were," he declares, and in case we missed it, he chalks IRREVERSIBLE on the blackboard in block letters. His paramour favors literary references: "'The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.' Milton, Paradise Lost." The fourth tale in this anthology of thwarted happiness involves a wistfully cheerful young housecleaner named Bea (Clea DuVall), who intersects with Troy's car as he's driving home elated from his courtroom triumph, puncturing both their balloons.
Several of the actors rise above the leaden ground fog of the pacing and mood from time to time. DuVall has a winsomeness that overcomes her handicap as the movie's representative of innocent goodness. McConaughey is delightful in his early brashness, but once his world is turned upside down, he develops a spiritual catatonia so profound that we begin to suspect he hit the windshield a little harder than we thought. Turturro and Irving have the toughest time of it, dragging through their segments as if trapped in aspic, and reciting lines of such painfully scripted transparency that an expert could probably trace the typewriter on which they were composed.
The best story is Arkin's, and he responds with a penetrating performance as a man who has had most of the creature feeling pummeled out of him by life, and yet manages to grasp a tendril that pushes through his calloused surface like a daisy through a sidewalk. His wife left him years ago, his son is a junkie and a petty criminal, he's stuck in a middle-management job, and the unquenchable optimism of Smiley is like salt spread daily on an open sore. But when his bitterness drives him to a spiteful act, his conscience nags him until he redresses the wrong, and he can return to his familiar purgatory of deadened feeling.
The Sprechers' dialogue and pacing are so lugubrious that it must have been an effect they were after. And the critical praise heaped on this picture would seem to justify the gamble. For all its problems, this is an interesting effort. But the suspicion lurks that there must have been a jar on the set with a sign ordering anyone who cracked a smile to drop in a dollar.
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