Los Angeles Stories

I can’t help but believe that somewhere inside answers to nothing It’s the big movie I really wanted it to be. Told as a series of interwoven subplots held together by a single event, it touches on a number of fascinating and compelling themes, including infidelity, recovery, loss, bigotry, love, faith, and strength of character. It features a decent cast, headlined by Dane Cook in his first dramatic role since 2007’s delicious crime thriller. mr brooks. It definitely had all the right ingredients. Unfortunately, the film falls victim to indecisive editing, character overload, implausible dramatic situations, and surprisingly unconvincing dialogue. All of this rests squarely on the shoulders of director Matthew Leutwyler, who is also a co-writer and editor.

Taking place in Los Angeles, we meet a plethora of characters whose lives are affected in some way by the disappearance of a young girl. There’s Frankie, the detective assigned to the case (Julie Benz); though she has yet to prove it, she seems convinced that the girl’s neighbor, Beckworth (Greg Germann), is responsible for her disappearance. In fact, she gives off creepy vibes in every scene she’s in. She even makes the rudely flippant gesture of taking Frankie out to dinner during her interrogation. Frankie’s friend, the lawyer Kate (Elizabeth Mitchell), is trying to get pregnant through in vitro fertilization. She wants a baby so badly that at first she doesn’t see it and then she turns a blind eye to the infidelity of her husband, a therapist named Ryan (Cook). She’s been dating a budding rock singer named Tara (Aja Volkman), who gets gigs but hasn’t gotten her big break yet.

Ryan doesn’t believe in anything, least of all in love. He is angry with his father for abandoning his mother and not telling him the truth. Her mother, Marylin (Barbara Hershey), is without a doubt the happiest person in the entire movie, even though it’s obvious that she gets by on nothing more than blind faith. She tried to drive this into Ryan by repeatedly telling him the very romantic story of how his grandparents met during World War II. Whether or not it happened the way she tells it, no one knows for sure. I’m not criticizing her for being like that; She would take happy lies over sad realities any day of the week and twice on Sundays. She even makes a nice point about how her love for Ryan lacks empirical evidence. The only way he knows that she loves him is because he believes her when she tells him.

Now we branch out further into subplots that are either (a) so loosely related to the child abduction subplot that they seem like they belong in another movie, or (b) are so poorly developed that they shouldn’t have been included in the first place. Kate’s current client is a recovering alcoholic named Drew (Miranda Bailey), who is fighting his parents for custody of his brother, Erik (Vincent Ventresca), a former runner who is now a vegetable. He seeks redemption by entering her and Erik in the Los Angeles Marathon and training hard for it. Meanwhile, we learn that Frankie is a single mom. In her only significant scene, Frankie’s teenage daughter (Karley Scott Collins) has a highly staged conversation with her teacher about Martin Luther King. The teacher, Carter (Mark Kelly), spends most of his time playing fantasy games on the Internet. Also, for reasons only known to the filmmakers, he has become obsessed with the missing girl case.

Then there’s Ryan’s patient, a self-loathing black woman named Allegra (Kali Hawk). As a television writer, she soon meets and begins dating a white man named Evan (Zach Gilford), who sits in a booth and balances out the sound of Tara’s band. Something might have played out here if it hadn’t just been a subplot. It deserved a movie of its own. As it is, Evan is essentially a non-entity, and the root of Allegra’s problems, including an extensive and arbitrary list of things he hates, remains undiscovered. Finally, there’s Carter’s neighbor, Jerry (Erik Palladino), who is introduced when he pulls Tara over for speeding. Around his time, we see him scanning obituaries and attending very specific funerals.

Inevitably, some will compare this film to that of Paul Haggis. Crash, in which Los Angeles is the setting for several intertwined stories that address social issues. Unlike this Oscar-winning masterpiece, answers to nothing it’s terribly out of focus. He spends too much time on certain subplots, not enough on others, and builds on them all with the idea that there really are no answers to anything. Certain scenes seem to have been included for no greater purpose than to create drama, most notably an unprovoked and unbelievable confrontation between Carter and Beckworth at the end of the film. Many passages of dialogue, including Marilyn’s observations on faith and love, sound less like flowing stage conversations and more like lectures from a speech and debate class. It always saddens me when a good idea is ruined by poor execution.