Third Person (2014)

Paul Haggis's Third Person arrives with the solemn bearing of a film convinced it has cracked the code of human intimacy. Three stories unfold across Paris, New York, and southern Italy, each charting a relationship's beginning, middle, or end, and all of them eventually revealed to be inventions of a grieving novelist. The structure is meant to dazzle. It mostly exhausts. Neeson broods through a Parisian affair with Olivia Wilde, Kunis stands accused of harming her child in a custody war, and Brody drifts through Italy chasing a Romani woman whose daughter has been kidnapped. The cast is uniformly accomplished and uniformly white, with the exception of Moran Atias, whose Roma character exists chiefly to be rescued.

The film's social consciousness is thin to the point of transparency. Women here are defined almost entirely by romantic paralysis and maternal catastrophe: Kunis fights for custody, Wilde cannot commit, and the screenplay treats both conditions as mysteries of the feminine instead of circumstances with causes. The Romani subplot gestures toward ethnic texture but deploys it as exotic machinery, a damsel and a ransom, not a perspective. There is no engagement with queerness, with class, with the body, with the climate, or with neurological difference. Haggis has made a film about love and loss and the lies people tell, and he has kept his gaze narrow throughout.

To its credit, Third Person does not lecture. It sermonizes only in the manner of a novelist who believes his own melancholy is universal, which is a gentler sin than the message movie. The result is a moody, self-serious puzzle that never quite justifies its own gravity. We are left with a handsomely photographed shrug, and the distinct impression that the film's cultural awareness begins and ends at the casting call.