Paul Haggis’ “Third Person” has nothing to say and spends 2 ¹/₂ hours not saying it. Its combination of pretentiousness, vanity and vapidity suggests Alain Resnais directing a triple episode of “Guiding Light.”
Reviving the played-out aughties fad for what Roger Ebert dubbed “hyperlink cinema” — movies like “Babel” and Haggis’ own “Crash” with multiple plot lines that lead to some grand conclusion — Haggis introduces three dull, weepy stories, lards them with dialogue of narcoleptic banality and keeps us waiting around for the explanation of what everyone has in common. (An early hint is that it’s something to do with missing children.)
Liam Neeson plays a married novelist holed up in Paris who, while finishing his latest tome, receives an alternately frisky and fraught visit from his young lover (Olivia Wilde), herself an aspiring writer. Meanwhile, back in New York, a ditz (Mila Kunis) keeps missing appointments to discuss visitation rights with her son by a famous artist (James Franco, not quite managing to look serious).
And in Rome, an American jerk (Adrien Brody) who steals fashion designs takes a liking to a hot Romanian (Moran Atias) and finds himself strung along to pay $5,000, or maybe $10,000, or maybe $25,000 to the gangster smugglers who keep raising the price for returning her daughter. Brody’s character is the kind of guy who gets an e-mail from a Nigerian promising a million-dollar payoff in return for a small upfront payment and thinks, “Tell me more!”
None of these plot lines ever come across as anything more than a shabby writer’s construction, and despite the gobs of back story everyone keeps spewing Haggis can’t even get across the basics: Instead of showing us Neeson as an astute analyst of the human condition, Haggis keeps telling us the scribe has a Pulitzer Prize. The things Neeson says are dopey pronouncements on love that sound like rejected lines from a Bruno Mars song. Kunis’ character is such a flake that keeping her away from her own son seems more like common sense than injustice, while Brody’s is so dumb he makes you wish you were a Romanian gangster.
Haggis is convinced that his ending will simultaneously draw everything together and knock you out with surprises, but instead he undermines himself in a reach for yet more banality. As with the scene in which Wilde puts on a man’s watch and pretends it’s her lover’s hand she’s using to caress herself, I was embarrassed to be present.