Ah, the speechifying movie, in which the playwright (come on, of course it's a playwright) tells us, in 90 minutes, how the world works and what's wrong with it. It's an extremely delicate flower -- no sane person has any interest in the playwrights life theories, so everything depends on whether the rest of the story is compelling enough to make us care. Almost every version fails because it's too heavy handed; predictable characters, doing predictable things for predictable reasons.
This one (barely) succeeds. The characters are each a mess, none of them likable, but they're not predictable and not boring, and that's enough to keep going.
I do have to say, in a world where every loser (including most of Hollywood) insists that nothing is their own fault, that their lives suck purely because of some vaguely defined 'ism, it's refreshing to re-encounter a movie that's willing to state categorically that the reason your life sucks is because of the bad, unforced, choices you made, again and again. I think it's features like this willingness to be honest with themselves and each other that, in the end, make the characters, not exactly appealing, but at least interesting enough to spend 90 minutes with.
This one (barely) succeeds. The characters are each a mess, none of them likable, but they're not predictable and not boring, and that's enough to keep going.
I do have to say, in a world where every loser (including most of Hollywood) insists that nothing is their own fault, that their lives suck purely because of some vaguely defined 'ism, it's refreshing to re-encounter a movie that's willing to state categorically that the reason your life sucks is because of the bad, unforced, choices you made, again and again. I think it's features like this willingness to be honest with themselves and each other that, in the end, make the characters, not exactly appealing, but at least interesting enough to spend 90 minutes with.