Aside from the fact that it starred Hollywood’s favourite OAP vigilante Liam Neeson, I knew absolutely nothing about Third Person when I went to see it. After two and a half long hours of hokey melodrama, writer/director Paul Haggis’ name came up on screen and suddenly it all made sense. Back in 2005, Haggis’ tiresomely worthy Crash inexplicably beat the wonderful Brokeback Mountain to the Best Picture Oscar, and now with Third Person, Haggis is back to his old tricks, interlocking multiple storylines in the false belief that this somehow makes a film emotionally and intellectually complex.
The film focuses on three couples in three cities. In Paris, writer Michael (Neeson) is resident at a swanky hotel finishing up his latest novel while conducting a volatile affair with Anna (Olivia Wilde). In New York, struggling actress Julia (Mila Kunis) is fighting her estranged husband Rick (James Franco) over custody of her son following an accident that may or may not have been her fault. In Rome, fashion buyer Scott (Adrien Brody) becomes involved with a woman (Moran Atias) he meets in a bar and is persuaded to help recover her young daughter from a group of smugglers.
It is undoubtedly a star-studded cast, and that’s not even mentioning smaller roles taken by Kim Basinger and Maria Bello. To give Haggis some credit for the structure of the piece, he does a good job in keeping each story flowing and effectively delineated from each other. Unfortunately, that’s as much praise as I can manage. I found Third Person tedious and irritating. Despite the best efforts of the actors involved, the characters and situations are universally unbelievable, yet it is all presented with such gravitas that it would seem that Haggis believed he was creating a meaningful epic rather than daytime soap opera trash.
The script is big on exposition but short on revelation. It meanders around a vague thematic connection of parental guilt, without ever really saying anything meaningful on the subject. Instead, Haggis just piles on the melodrama to sometimes ludicrous effect. If you don’t spot his third act coup de grace coming from the first twenty minutes, you’re really not paying attention. Self-important and over-long, Third Person is another car crash of a film from Haggis.