The mentality following the termination of a serious relationship has been the subject of countless pieces of art, but two films really brought film to new levels on the topic. Those films were Annie Hall and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. In both cases, you got a well developed sense of the internal despair of a hard breakup and the mental inability to stop analyzing and going over what happened, what was right, and, ultimately, why it all came tumbling down. Charlie Sheen returns to theaters for the first time in nine years in Roman Coppola's A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III. Coppola's most recent cinematic efforts include co-writing the screenplays for Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited and Moonrise Kingdom. Here, he attempts to add another story to the genre so incredibly well defined by Annie Hall or Eternal Sunshine.
Charles Swan III is a rampant womanizer, but he has been with a woman that he has really fallen for, but she has broken up with him following her discovery of a drawer filled with dirty pictures of his past girlfriends and hookups. Now, he is devastated and falling behind in his work as a graphic designer. Rather than deal with the issues, he is both stuck in the past and his fantasies of both the world and how the past could have worked. The film feel surreal from frame one, and never really gets to a point where the stylized universe it is set in is differentiated with some sense of reality. This style walks a fine line between style and substance. Woody Allen showed in the 70s how the two can actually mesh quite will. Roman Coppola, unfortunately, does not pay the same amount of attention to developing his characters as he does to their costumes or the soundtrack.
Ultimately, the single flaw that keeps Charles Swan from being a noteworthy film is the single dimension all the characters share. Coppola's characters don't really stand out because they're not developed. Everyone has a trait or two and all depth stops there. The characters aren't particularly funny, endearing, or memorable. More than anything else, the film fails to get you to either relate to or root for the failed love story. Everything takes such a stylized approach that you get a nice looking, visually interesting film, but no emotional core or anything to latch onto. A film like this cannot work unless the love story, whether you root for them to be together or not, is honest. There's no real world honesty in this film, like it was written by someone who hasn't experienced the subject matter but is guessing based on other movies.
That's not to say the film is hard to watch or necessarily a waste of time. It's hard to spend time with Charlie Sheen, Bill Murray, Aubrey Plaza, and Jason Schwartzman and not enjoy some of it. Each actor does a very good job with their respective characters, so much so that you really just wish the screenplay had a few more drafts to become something you can latch on to or even a memorable line or two. It's an interesting project, sure, but a failure to achieve anything at all. In a sense, I would rather just watch these four actors sit around and talk to each other for two hours, because I'm sure that would yield some incredibly entertaining results. As such a huge Wes Anderson fan, I couldn't let myself miss this film, but it's clear that Wes Anderson brings very different sensibilities to his stylized worlds than Roman Coppola. One critic said it better than I would by suggesting that this film probably appeals most to fans of Wes Anderson who don't understand what makes his movies special.
Some interesting writing, visuals, and acting all and all make this still more entertaining than the majority of action blockbusters I see in a year, but Charles Swan III is ultimately a failure at becoming a worthy addition to its genre. It has some nice direction, but leaves you unmoved and with little to remember. I'm not exactly sure who to recommend this to, because this isn't your usual Charlie Sheen work, even. I suppose this is a film for film lovers like myself who can't pass up an interesting project. Perhaps, decades from now, someone will find this to be a gem. As for now, I say just go back and rewatch Annie Hall.
6/10
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