Ten years ago, Paul Haggis gave us Crash, a reasonable drama about the interplay and inter-collision of different lives on the Los Angeles freeway. It was wildly over-praised by Academy Award voters, and since then wildly over-attacked by critics who can’t forgive Haggis for beating Brokeback Mountain to the Oscar. But now Haggis has given us the real car wreck: it’s a deeply dubious luxury-tourist fantasy about parallel lives in various foreign hotel rooms, and it shows a very strange need to punish and humiliate its female characters.
Liam Neeson is the rich and famous author in his hotel suite, having a passionate affair with beautiful, troubled Olivia Wilde; she naughtily looks at his “journal” and muses on how autobiographical jottings are transformed into a fictional third person. James Franco is an equally preposterous painter with a connection to beautiful, troubled Mila Kunis. Meanwhile, well-off Adrian Brody strikes up a tense relationship with Moran Atias, playing a beautiful, troubled woman. Rather like Fernando Meirelles with his equally tiresome globetrotting film 360, Third Person is a supercilious, incurious and glib pondering about the lives of the people swanning about one’s five-star hotel foyer or cleaning one’s hotel suite.
