Third Person

This movie is contrived without even succeeding in doing that convincingly. It exudes clichés. When a character is an author or a successful painter immediately I smell clichés. To have them as major characters is hackneyed in the extreme. The movie is full of holes and pretends to be mysterious where it is merely indulging in pretentious obfuscation. When the obnoxious American whines about people not speaking English in Italy it rings true to an extent but as a scene in a movie, it comes over a clumsy and somewhat gauche. When the Roma woman says "Do you think I am too stupid to speak English?" I cringed because it seems the script writer subconsciously at least, connected not being good at English with being stupid. Evidently it was all right for the American not to be able to speak Italian. I hate that attitude and even though it happens in life, it put me in a bad frame of mind about the screenplay. That put me in a bad mood all right and I found the American's character less than charming. When this Scott (I think) whined that the bar was called the Americano so therefore they should speak English, I immediately thought that the staff of Italian restaurants all over the world don't automatically speak Italian.. shudder. In fact none of the characters except for the Roma were in the least likable. Its hard to like a movie when you find the characters charmless. Liam Neeson also exuded a comprehensive charmless-ness. The Italian scenes were riddled with clichés right down to the predictable little Fiats that I knew would be coming. The parallel stories had no interweaving whatsoever and one wonders why you would pick some unconnected boring stories at random and present them for no apparent reason. I am visiting Rome at Christmas and this movie nearly put me off going. There was no romance extracted from Paris either. It was straight out boring. Just putting Rome and Paris in a movie does not automatically give it an air of romance. I didn't see any beautiful photography either. It looked very mundane. How you can make Paris and Rome look so prosaic in a film is utterly beyond me. Other cringe-worthy elements included the scene where Neeson tricks the woman into disrobing and then locks her out of the room without a key. It was excruciating and had all the panache of an adolescent prank. Not the character's prank but the screenwriter's prank and the director's prank. The stories were unrelated and had gaps so wide you could sail the Titanic through them. I was only fascinated by wondering how much worse the film was going to get and the mechanics of its inexorable deterioration; though actually it started badly in the first place. I wonder throughout the film how exactly the next scene would be worse. That was the only reason I did not walk out. There was nothing artistic about Third Person; it was masquerading as an arty film but it only succeeded in being gauche and pretentious. It was produced by a company called Highway 61 and there was an obvious reference to Bob Dylan's Tangled up in Blue when the lady bends to tie the laces of Neeson's shoe. But it lacked the poignancy of the Dylan song; it just came over as obvious and clumsy like everything about this gauche and pretentious movie.

Third Person_720p(480P)

source: Third Person

All Spoilers This offers more of an unraveling for the mystified than much of a review. Michael (Liam Neeson) is an author who writes about himself in the third person where he is 'a writer'. The movie is called Third Person. The trick and decoy here is that while it is all written in the third person from each sub-hero's limited perspective, including Michael the writer, it is in truth all about the First Person: Michael the author. By having his characters breach social and moral rules in his story he explores possibilities for his soul's salvation in order to ease his conscience, his suffering after the role he played in the tragedy of his son's drowning. So, the stories we see played out in the film are in the writer's story but more importantly its main theme is the author's story thus making the whole thing a creation in the Third Person Omniscient narrative style. The 3 stories and their function: 1) The affair which includes incest – can this moral breach help our hero's pain and the writer's pain, or by some miracle can it bring his son back to life? 2) If he encountered a strange woman in a bar for whom there was a way to reunite with her child and he gave her every cent he had in the world, on trust, to help her get her child back would this work to balance the scales? 3) If he had been responsible for placing his son's life in danger but he placed the blame on his wife and arranged things so that she was held legally responsible and then punished by never being allowed to see her son again (as is the case for him), would this provide the necessary catharsis? In each story the male character has probably committed the sin to some degree while some of the tension is in the possibility that it was about the female - or that the female at least plays a large part in our hero's grief and so can share the blame. The affair girl sleeps with her father; the maid girl who can't get her son back is at the mercy of the cruel famous artist husband who uses her to hide his guilt; the guy in Italy has committed the same sin as Michael the writer by leaving his son alone in the pool while he answers a phone call. For me this latter plot move was the confusing part and also the big reveal where 'third person limited' bled through to 'third person omniscient'. To some up and rightly or wrongly to give all those who are confused some closure, in Third Person the hero of the story is, Michael the author who writes 3 stories in the 'third person limited' narrative style, but finally we see that the story is in the 'third person omniscient' style – as another reviewer commented here – 'it is all in his head'. Thank God that after such an odyssey it appeared to end as happily ever after as was possible (glimpse of child in back seat of car).

This movie is contrived without even succeeding in doing that convincingly. It exudes clichés. When a character is an author or a successful painter immediately I smell clichés. To have them as major characters is hackneyed in the extreme. The movie is full of holes and pretends to be mysterious where it is merely indulging in pretentious obfuscation. When the obnoxious American whines about people not speaking English in Italy it rings true to an extent but as a scene in a movie, it comes over a clumsy and somewhat gauche. When the Roma woman says "Do you think I am too stupid to speak English?" I cringed because it seems the script writer subconsciously at least, connected not being good at English with being stupid. Evidently it was all right for the American not to be able to speak Italian. I hate that attitude and even though it happens in life, it put me in a bad frame of mind about the screenplay. That put me in a bad mood all right and I found the American's character less than charming. When this Scott (I think) whined that the bar was called the Americano so therefore they should speak English, I immediately thought that the staff of Italian restaurants all over the world don't automatically speak Italian.. shudder. In fact none of the characters except for the Roma were in the least likable. Its hard to like a movie when you find the characters charmless. Liam Neeson also exuded a comprehensive charmless-ness. The Italian scenes were riddled with clichés right down to the predictable little Fiats that I knew would be coming. The parallel stories had no interweaving whatsoever and one wonders why you would pick some unconnected boring stories at random and present them for no apparent reason. I am visiting Rome at Christmas and this movie nearly put me off going. There was no romance extracted from Paris either. It was straight out boring. Just putting Rome and Paris in a movie does not automatically give it an air of romance. I didn't see any beautiful photography either. It looked very mundane. How you can make Paris and Rome look so prosaic in a film is utterly beyond me. Other cringe-worthy elements included the scene where Neeson tricks the woman into disrobing and then locks her out of the room without a key. It was excruciating and had all the panache of an adolescent prank. Not the character's prank but the screenwriter's prank and the director's prank. The stories were unrelated and had gaps so wide you could sail the Titanic through them. I was only fascinated by wondering how much worse the film was going to get and the mechanics of its inexorable deterioration; though actually it started badly in the first place. I wonder throughout the film how exactly the next scene would be worse. That was the only reason I did not walk out. There was nothing artistic about Third Person; it was masquerading as an arty film but it only succeeded in being gauche and pretentious. It was produced by a company called Highway 61 and there was an obvious reference to Bob Dylan's Tangled up in Blue when the lady bends to tie the laces of Neeson's shoe. But it lacked the poignancy of the Dylan song; it just came over as obvious and clumsy like everything about this gauche and pretentious movie.

Paul Haggis both wrote and directed this very long movie (137 minutes) that plays with our minds in a way not dissimilar to his most famous similar film CRASH. The quilted story takes patience and close attention to paste each of the three running stories together – three (at times augmented) couples whose lives are altered in some way by a child – drowning, abusive by placing in a plastic bag, a conveniently imagined child – and it all ties together with slips of paper, pages of novels, paintings and other threads spread around Paris, Rome, and New York. 'Michael (Liam Neeson) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction author who has sequestered himself in a hotel suite in Paris to finish his latest book. He recently left his wife, Elaine (Kim Basinger), and is having a tempestuous affair with Anna (Olivia Wilde), an ambitious young journalist who wants to write and publish fiction. At the same time, Scott (Adrien Brody), a shady American 'clothing designer' businessman, is in Italy to steal designs from fashion houses. Hating everything Italian, Scott wanders into the Café American with barkeep Marco (Riccardo Scamarcio) in search of something familiar to eat. There, he meets Monika (Moran Atias), a beautiful Romanian woman, who is about to be reunited with her young daughter. When the money she has saved to pay her daughter's smuggler Carlo (Viinico Marchioni) has stolen, Scott feels compelled to help. They take off together for a dangerous town in Southern Italy, where Scott starts to suspect that he is the patsy in an elaborate con game. Julia (Mila Kunis), an ex-soap opera actress, is caught in a custody battle for her 6 year-old son with her ex-husband Rick (James Franco), a famous New York artist. With her support cut off and her legal costs ruinous, Julia is reduced to working as a maid in the same upscale boutique hotel where she was once a frequent guest. Julia's lawyer Theresa (Maria Bello) has secured Julia one final chance to change the court's mind and be reunited with the child she loves. Rick's current girlfriend Sam (Loan Chabanol) is a compassionate onlooker.' With a cast such as this the film works as well as it can with such obtuse twists and turns involving each of the three couples. The film 'feels' like it wants to be wonderful, but it just plods along too slowly to make us care very much about this odd groups of maladjusted misfits.

Third Person is an odd beast of a film. It awkwardly tries to tell three different stories of love, romance and loss - none of which seem, at least on the surface, connected in any way. The characters can sometimes feel paper-thin and poorly-written, and their motivations are murky at best. But, stick with it all the way to the end, and you'll find that writer-director Paul Haggis' premise is a twisted and very ambitious one. It's almost reason enough to excuse the fact that the film he's created out of it isn't actually all that good. We open on Michael (Neeson), a tortured, prize-winning novelist who's holed himself up in a hotel in Paris to write his latest book. There, he meets his mistress Anna (Wilde), a bright, feisty woman with aspirations to write and a deep secret of her own, even as he chats with his estranged wife Elaine (Kim Basinger) on the phone. Cut to Rome, where Scott (Brody) takes a break from trading in top-secret fashion designs to get embroiled in the life and troubles of Monika (Atias), a woman trying to buy her young daughter back from a smuggler. Meanwhile, in New York, Julia (Kunis) struggles to keep herself together in her bitter custody battle with ex-husband Rick (Franco). All she wants is to see their son again, but events keep conspiring against her every attempt to prove herself worthy of visitation rights. There's no denying that Haggis' fundamental concept for Third Person is fascinating. It's layered with rich ideas - the genesis of inspiration, the power of creation, the themes of loss, lies and love, and what it means to really trust someone - and its narrative twist even accounts for some of the cardboard-stiff dialogue that emerges from the mouths of Haggis' characters. Speaking of which, the twist, which an astute viewer should be able to figure out at some point during the film, actually becomes more audacious in the final few moments - when secrets unravel, and it becomes clear just what kind of person Michael really is. But what's so very frustrating about Third Person is that it never really lives up to its potential. Sure, its premise and characters can be picked over for ages: what is real, and what's imaginary? Did this character actually say that? What is the significance of that character? - and so on. But would anyone who has sat through the entire film really want to? For the most part, Third Person unspools like a tedious melodrama, with Haggis' generally quite accomplished cast (surprising MVP: Kunis) speaking in odd, weighty language that would not feel out of place in a soap opera. The characters all struggle to feel real, with Anna in particular flitting between emotional extremes in a most wearying manner. That might be Haggis' point - but it's hammered home in so joyless a fashion that it's hard to care too much, after a while. Ultimately, Haggis' high concept proves to be the film's bright spot - and also its undoing. He has to juggle so furiously to keep all his balls in the air that he perhaps fails to realise that his three stories only become genuinely interesting in retrospect - which is a criminal waste of his audiences' interest and affections. He also doesn't really go as far with his concept as he could have done, although that might - arguably - be because he wants to allow his viewers the chance to finish the story for themselves. Whatever the case may be, Third Person languishes when it should race, and loses itself in the intriguing knots of its own premise.

Poor old Paul Haggis, ever since his success as a dedicated screenwriter with the likes of Million Dollar Baby and his Oscar winning directional comeback Crash (one of the most backlashed Best Picture winners in Oscar history) he seems to have entered into a creative funk that has seen him direct In the Valley of Elah and the Next Three Days, both financially unsuccessful and mediocre films that have now reached a new low with this Crash wannabe Third Person. Third Person is the very epitome of a pretentious movie, a long winded self-assured multi character spanning drama that goes on far too long and attempts to wow us with its final reveal. It's a film with an interesting idea yet not the sense to play it out in an effective manner and it's a showcase for Haggis's lost touch behind camera that he can't illicit any good will from his actors, his story or his characters. Third Person seems intent on being depressing at any given time and while that is not a movie ruining play it doesn't work here when the script is so bland and situations so unbelievable in many aspects. The story line between Adrien Brody's seedy businessman Scott and Moran Atias's feisty mother Monika has to be one of the worst of last year and no amount of quality acting could've saved it or the picture as a whole. While the lead here may be the ever stoic Liam Neeson as troubled writer Michael, Third Person spreads its acting burden across the capable shoulders of Olivia Wilde, Mila Kunis, Adrien Brody, James Franco and bit turns by the likes of Kim Basinger and Maria Bello, yet you wouldn't say a single one comes out of it on tops although Wilde shows some hidden intensity that showcases a more worthwhile film could well benefit from her presence. How all these people's lives interact with each other's is one of the films many frustrating pay offs and it makes you question why the story needed to be told in the way it was, but sadly it feels where the pretension of greatness stems from, you can almost see Haggis licking his directional lips at the thought of more Crash like success. A dull film that thinks itself to be oh so clever, Third Person is a downright boring movie with a raft of unlikeable and uninteresting characters who occupy a storyline line that consistently fly's the line between utterly unbelievable through to total boredom. You're always sitting and waiting for Third Person to go somewhere, anywhere but thank goodness there are moments when people yell or break things as if they didn't, Third Person would've been one of the year's biggest non-events in a narrative and movie sense. As it stands, it's just plain old awful. 1 and a half white roses out of 5 For more movie reviews and opinions check into - www.jordanandeddie.wordpress.com

If you see a large number of user reviews with spoilers it's because this movie has a complex story line that is hard to describe without spoiling the suspense and confusion that one experiences while watching it for the first time. Don't read the spoilers until after you see the film or you will rip yourself off. My partner and I saw it at the Rehoboth Beach film festival and really didn't know exactly what to think at the end of the movie. We had both been engrossed and intrigued but felt unsatisfied at the end… until we were discussing it on the way home and figured out what we had just seen. The most popular spoiler alert review nails the plot, but suffice to say that this is no typical "I can see were this is going" movie, it was almost "I see dead people but they don't know they are dead" kind of realization, only for us, we didn't get it until a half an hour after the movie was over. We actually didn't realize how good it was until we thought about it. I would recommend it and I will watch it again to tie up all the clues given along the way.

I loved the plot and also the actings, and I truly don't understand the low reviews. I mean, of course it is not an easy film to watch, sometimes it fails to keep your attentions because it does develop slowly and most parts you don't get it right away... But it is a great movie, intelligent and with amazing actings. I confess I didn't get all the points right away and had to do a little research afterwards, but when I got it all, the story became even more beautiful. I gathered some of those points I found important to understand to be able to evaluate the movie properly, so if you don't want spoilers DON'T READ BELOW HERE. *******SPOILER ALERT******* 1. The writer was NOT in Paris writing his book; he was in Rome. Maybe some people missed this detail (as I did), but when his wife calls him, in the final scene, she asks him, "How's Rome?". And also you can clearly see he's sitting in a café in an Italian city. 2. Everything that happens between the starting scene, when he hears his son's voice on the hotel room "Watch me," and the same voice "Watch me" in the final scene of the film, is part of his book -- including the story about the writer in Paris with his lover. Probably his mistress name was not Anna, and we can notice that she is fictional by how idealized (at least partially) she is: young, pretty, and with sense of humour, and perfect. * Remember that he always writes in Third Person (not by chance, the name of the movie). ** Perhaps Paris did happen, but not during that time space we are watching the movie. Maybe months ago... Note that his wife calls him twice and both times she asks: "Is she there?", and he always answers "No" -- in the final scene, he still adds "She left me two months ago". *** Note the references to white in each story: Anna's dress in the final scene is white, the glass of milk the child gives his father is white, and the car in which the American drives away with the gypsy lady is also white. "White the color of trust. And the color of the lies he tells himself" -- says the end of the book. 3. As he atones for his sins through the characters from his book, we know what really happened going from there: In real life, he loses his lover when she learns that it was because of her call that his son drowned; in Paris' story, his mistress ("the only true love of his life") comes back to him. In real life, he loses his son; in Italy's story, the American saves the gypsy lady's daughter (note that inside the car they look back and smile, and as the camera goes away you can see the silhouette of a child in the back seat of the white car). In real life, he never wins back the trust of his ex-wife; in the story with Mila Kunis, James Franco trusts her again after the incident in the elevator. * Also note the references to bad fathers in each story: In Italy, the American also lost his son. In New York, the boy's father is absent and always working, and they do not have a close relationship. In Paris, the father used to abuse of Anna, probably since she was a child.