There are reviews of this movie that boggle my mind, giving it far more credit than it deserves. You can't dangle disjointed, languid nonsense and call it art. It's its too boring to be called farcical, too stupid to be called pretentious, and too apathetic to be called disappointing.
The reviews giving this mistake of a movie more credit than it deserves is a prime case of reviewers being too cowardly to say, "This movie makes no sense and has no redeeming qualities." They're too scared that they might be missing some artistic merit to say "This film is meritless." They're too worried they'll be called out by the pseudo-intellectual crowd as ignorant. No, it's thee pretend auteurs that are ignorant. One such IMDB reviewer mentions "the ingenious casting to Isabella Rossellini" as Gyllenhaal's character's mother, but there's nothing ingenious about it. The character Rossellini plays had three minutes of screen time, and five lines. The part could have been player by a mop and had been just as inspired of a casting choice.
As for the movie itself, imagine watching paint dry, but every once in a while a spider crawls across the paint and then crawls out of sight, leaving no trace behind it, but infinitely more boring than that scenario.
It's like the writer of this film asked a friend at a bar, "Hey, what if you met your doppelganger?" and that friend replied, "I don't know. That'd be weird." and the writer used that as the entire script of the movie. I haven't read the book the film is based on, and I'm too scared I'll kill myself out of boredom to do so.
The reviews giving this mistake of a movie more credit than it deserves is a prime case of reviewers being too cowardly to say, "This movie makes no sense and has no redeeming qualities." They're too scared that they might be missing some artistic merit to say "This film is meritless." They're too worried they'll be called out by the pseudo-intellectual crowd as ignorant. No, it's thee pretend auteurs that are ignorant. One such IMDB reviewer mentions "the ingenious casting to Isabella Rossellini" as Gyllenhaal's character's mother, but there's nothing ingenious about it. The character Rossellini plays had three minutes of screen time, and five lines. The part could have been player by a mop and had been just as inspired of a casting choice.
As for the movie itself, imagine watching paint dry, but every once in a while a spider crawls across the paint and then crawls out of sight, leaving no trace behind it, but infinitely more boring than that scenario.
It's like the writer of this film asked a friend at a bar, "Hey, what if you met your doppelganger?" and that friend replied, "I don't know. That'd be weird." and the writer used that as the entire script of the movie. I haven't read the book the film is based on, and I'm too scared I'll kill myself out of boredom to do so.