He's at it again. Having so successfully explored the messiness of adult life, chance and fate in the Oscar-winning Crash, writer-director Paul Haggis has put together another all-star cast to ask the big questions in Third Person. You won't have any life-changing answers at the end but a bit of dust will be blown off both head and heart. Now, there's something that doesn't happen in a cinema every time.
Read our interview with Paul Haggis here.
Whereas Crash was set in one city, Los Angeles, Third Person tri-locates for its stories of love and loss, endings and beginnings and how small things can end up having such huge consequences. Neeson plays a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who meets his lover (Wilde) in Paris. Brody is a businessman killing time in a Rome bar who has his head turned by a stranger (Atias) a couple of stools down. Kunis is cast as a former actress whose life is falling apart in New York. All have more in common here than just great performances.
"Do we always know why we do things?" asks one of the characters in Third Person, and that's a pretty good summation of the journey Haggis takes us on. His parallel plots run very smoothly; there's plenty of teasing as you go from one to the next and you have even more admiration for everyone on screen at the end than you had at the beginning. It's not as powerful and provocative a film as Crash but it deserves a bigger audience than the one it's going to get.
The characters here wish they could turn back time in some way - if they and this film belong anywhere it would be among the good company of the films of the Seventies.
Harry Guerin
