Thanks for Sharing (2013)

Thanks for Sharing arrives from 2013 with a premise that sounds like a dare: three men in a New York twelve-step program for sex addiction, bound together by sponsorship and the shared humiliation of a condition the culture had only recently agreed to name. Stuart Blumberg directs his own script with the patience of a group facilitator, letting Mark Ruffalo, Tim Robbins, and Josh Gad cycle through relapse, confession, and small increments of progress. The movie wants to be a romcom and a recovery drama at once, and it never quite decides, which is the sort of indecision that reads as honesty more often than it should.

The ensemble includes Isiah Whitlock Jr. and the pop singer Alecia Moore, billed as P!nk, in supporting turns, and both are good in the unremarkable way that good supporting turns are good. Moore's Dede has an abusive ex and a sponsor she cannot reach, and she gets a genuine arc about learning to be friends with a man. Gwyneth Paltrow's Phoebe has trust issues of her own. The film treats these women as people with problems, not as vehicles for an argument, and that restraint now looks almost quaint. Nobody here is asked to represent anything larger than themselves.

There is a little moralizing in the group scenes, the inevitable twelve-step catechism about honesty and accountability, but the film prefers to dramatize the shame instead of explaining it. Race is not a subject. Class is not a subject. The environment, the economy, and the body are not subjects. What remains is a modest, uneven, occasionally affecting piece of grown-up American filmmaking, and the sommelier's verdict is a light one.