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.
