Los Angeles stories
I can’t help but believe that somewhere inside answers to nothing It’s the big movie I really wanted it to be. Told as a series of interwoven subplots tied together by a single event, it touches on a number of fascinating and compelling themes, including infidelity, recovery, loss, bigotry, love, faith, and strength of character. It features a decent cast, led by Dane Cook in his first dramatic role since the delicious 2007 crime thriller. mr brooks. It definitely had all the right ingredients. Unfortunately, the film falls victim to indecisive editing, character overload, unlikely dramatic situations, and surprisingly unconvincing dialogue. All of this rests squarely on the shoulders of director Matthew Leutwyler, who is also a co-writer and editor.
Taking place in Los Angeles, we meet a plethora of characters whose lives are affected in some way by the disappearance of a young girl. There’s Frankie, the detective assigned to the case (Julie Benz); Although she has yet to prove it, she seems convinced that the girl’s neighbor, Beckworth (Greg Germann), is responsible for her disappearance. In fact, she gives off creepy vibes in every scene she’s in. She even makes the rudely flippant gesture of inviting Frankie to dinner during her interrogation. Frankie’s friend, lawyer Kate (Elizabeth Mitchell), is trying to get pregnant through in vitro fertilization. She wants a baby so badly that she at first doesn’t see it and then she turns a blind eye to the infidelity of her husband, a therapist named Ryan (Cook). She has been dating a budding rock singer named Tara (Aja Volkman), who lands gigs but has yet to get her big break.
Ryan doesn’t believe in anything, least of all in love. He is angry at his father for abandoning his mother and not telling him the truth. Her mother, Marylin (Barbara Hershey), is arguably the happiest person in the entire movie, though it’s obvious she gets by on nothing but blind faith. She tried to impress this on Ryan by repeatedly telling him the very romantic story of how his grandparents met during World War II. Whether or not it happened the way she tells it, no one knows for sure. I’m not criticizing her for being like that; She would take happy lies over sad facts any day of the week and twice on Sundays. She even makes a nice comment about how her love for Ryan lacks empirical evidence. The only way he knows she loves him is because he believes her when she tells him.
We now branch out further into subplots that are either (a) so distantly related to the child abduction subplot that they seem to belong in another movie, or (b) so poorly developed that they shouldn’t have been included in the first place. Kate’s current client is a recovering alcoholic named Drew (Miranda Bailey), who is fighting his parents for custody of his brother, Erik (Vincent Ventresca), a former running back turned vegetable. He seeks redemption by running her and Erik in the Los Angeles Marathon and training hard for it. Meanwhile, we learn that Frankie is a single mother. In her only significant scene, Frankie’s (Karley Scott Collins) teenage daughter has a highly staged conversation with her teacher about Martin Luther King. The teacher, Carter (Mark Kelly), spends most of his time playing fantasy games on the Internet. Also, for reasons known only to the filmmakers, he has become obsessed with the case of the missing girl.
Then there’s Ryan’s patient, a self-deprecating black woman named Allegra (Kali Hawk). As a TV writer, she soon meets and begins dating a white man named Evan (Zach Gilford), who sits in a booth and balances the sound of Tara’s band. Something might have played out here if it hadn’t just been a subplot. It deserved a movie of its own. As it is, Evan is essentially a non-entity, and the root of Allegra’s problems, including an extensive and arbitrary list of things he hates, remains undiscovered. Finally, there’s Carter’s neighbor Jerry (Erik Palladino), who is introduced when he pulls Tara over for speeding. In due time with him, we see him scanning obituaries and attending very specific funerals.
Inevitably, some will compare this film to Paul Haggis’s. Shock, in which Los Angeles is the scene of several intertwined stories that address social issues. Unlike this Oscar-winning masterpiece, answers to nothing it’s terribly out of focus. He spends too much time on certain subplots, not enough on others, and builds them all up with the idea that there really aren’t any answers at all. Certain scenes seem to have been included for no greater purpose than creating drama, most notably an unprovoked and unbelievable confrontation between Carter and Beckworth at the end of the film. Many passages of dialogue, including Marilyn’s remarks on faith and love, sound less like flowing theatrical conversation and more like sermons from a speech and debate class. It always saddens me when a good idea is ruined by poor execution.