Here’s a screenwriting tip: if you want your main character, and maybe some folks in his orbit, to spout paragraphs about ethics or Schopenhauer’s erotic inquiries and not have it sound weird, just make him a celebrated philosophy professor. The Columbia University setting allows writer-director Tim Blake Nelson to have his Cartesian dialectic and eat it too in this brainy and engaging ensemble drama. Reminiscent of some of John Sayles’s films from the 1990s, but with an eye more toward Bergman-esque eternal quandaries than civic complications, Anesthesia opens with a scene of violence, then backtracks a few days to see how a wide cast of characters inadvertently set everything in motion.
At the film’s center is a righteous, optimistic thinker, the soon-to-retire educator played by Sam Waterston. His son (played by Nelson himself) is worried about his own wife (Jessica Hecht), who may have cancer. Nelson’s character has two children, a brilliant but smart-alecky son (Ben Konigsberg) and a socially conflicted daughter (Hannah Marks, who stands out despite appearing in just a few scenes). He’s also got a star pupil (Kristen Stewart), “brilliant but troubled”, looking so pale and so weary in her black turtleneck sweater it’s as if Morrissey’s discography somehow became sentient and took human form. Elsewhere in the city is a heroin addict (K Todd Freeman) who is dragged to rehab by his childhood chum (Michael K Williams), a very successful lawyer. There’s also a boozy housewife in an Englewood, New Jersey (Gretchen Mol), and a British woman (Mickey Sumner) sleeping with a bald man (Corey Stoll), and, I swear, it’s all going to come together and make sense – just stick with it.
The bad news is this: a movie with this sort of framing device makes trying to determine how the puzzle pieces fit together its driving force. And the truth is, the Crash-like element is ultimately the least meaningful part. In the end, some of the connections reveal themselves to be truly random. In a movie that pontificates so earnestly about the importance of truth, this gimmick feels rather false.
The good news is that all of the individual scenes, even the ones that resemble a play being workshopped right there on the screen, have sharp writing, good performances and are interesting in and of themselves. A glass-half-empty viewer may shrug and wonder what Gretchen Mol’s grumpy scenes dropping her kids off at school has to do with anything else, but another way to look at this cinematic tapestry is to treat each sequence as part of an array of finely observed short films. Philosophically speaking, that may be the more positive way to go.
