Cases like these are so frustrating. It's like falling in love with a pretty smile, only to find the target of your affection has no heart. I wanted to like this one, because of the idea and because these small productions deserve everyone's attention.
Alas, the imaginative backbone that could have offered remarkable chances in the hands of a skillful writer is turned into a generic mess. Some of this is Keret's fault, too. As you probably know, the story is about an afterlife for those who have died by their own hand. The thing is that the world is just like ours, except even more grey and bland. Our main character ends up on a road trip with his Russian friend and a girl who "shouldn't be there", in search of some sense for the events and perhaps a way to find love again.
The problem is that the afterlife is not the only thing that depresses the watcher: the total unimaginativeness of the (original) story is the second. So much could have been derived from the setup, but the sad truth is that everything of any importance is shown to us during the first fifteen minutes: Joy Division playing in the bar, no one can smile, everyone carries the scars of their death. After this introduction, it all starts going wrong because nothing else connects with the theme; all sorts of goofy things happen, but they could just as well happen in a Charlie Kaufman -movie or in any reality-twisting comedy. The quirky events, characters and items have no context and quickly turn out to be just there to make the world seem a bit stranger. Yeah, there's a black hole under the car's seat. Yeah, Tom Waits sleeps in the middle of the road. Yeah, one of the characters is an Eskimo who speaks only in guttural sounds. None of this matters, and it's not even funny. Later we are introduced to 'miracles', which are just as boring and out of context as the rest of the material. Not only unimaginative, throughout the movie we get many painful examples of bad writing, like the scene where one of the characters just pops out of the blue to tell the main character (and us) what is actually happening. You DON'T DO THIS, especially not in A MOVIE, A VISUAL MEDIUM! Every writer knows this: maybe someone was just too lazy at some point. The ending, otherwise pretty well modified from the book's, creates at least one major plot hole.
The dialog is quite bad and the characters are mostly uninteresting, but some of the blame goes for the actors who seem to spend all the time thinking of their older hits. Fugit is a slightly more depressed version of his William from 'Almost Famous', Sossamon plays the girl from 'The Rules of Attraction', Waits has had many similar roles and Arnett is once again GOB, although it's questionable if he ever plays any other character. The only one with no former references is Shea Wigham, who just goes on to do a really poor man's imitation of Eugene Hutz. Considering that the director knows Hutz personally, it would have been much less painful to give the part to the man himself.
But it was an intriguing idea when it started. Shame there's really nothing to cling on to here.
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