13 Conversations About One Thing film review

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13 CONVERSATIONS ABOUT ONE THING

An absorbing Altmanesque drama, the one thing that is discussed in Jill Sprecher's new film is life itself. In a similar way to Short Cuts or Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, the film follows a group of seemingly disparate characters as they make their way through the demanding world of the big city, with the pressures of life, love and labour bearing heavily on their shoulders. It's a welcome distraction from the usual Hollywood fodder and in the accomplished hands of Sprecher and a sensitive ensemble cast, potentially troublesome material is turned into something more memorable.

The characters come from all walks of society, from the seemingly successful to the obviously desperate. Matthew McConaughey plays Troy, a high-flying and self-centred District Attorney who, at the beginning of the film, is obnoxiously celebrating his latest success in a downtown bar. Noticing a sad-looking man at the bar (Alan Arkin) he tries, and fails, to cheer him up, with some homespun hokum. Arkin wants none of it, and we shortly find out why.

The film then follows both of these characters - playing with both our expectations and the usual linear sense of film time - and we discover why they are in such emotional extremes, and in one case, how happiness can be destroyed in a second. Arkin's Gene is a mid-level insurance executive who has been in the game too long, and who is troubled by both a particularly cheery employee in his office as well as the plight of his son, a perennial petty criminal and drug addict.

Connections and coincidences occur between many of the characters and in further plotlines we follow John Turturro's Walker, a university professor who is recovering from a mugging and on the brink of leaving his wife for another woman. Meanwhile, in the film's most poignant strand, Clea Duvall is Beatrice, a cleaner who harbours a crush on one of her clients and the character who perhaps undergoes the most life-changing events of the film.

It might sound dreary, pretentious even, to describe the film as being about happiness and the meaning of life itself, but it's far from it. 13 Conversations makes us look at our own lives and assess the precarious decisions we make, with characters that have mores and foibles that are commonplace and recognisable. To do so without becoming boring or didactic makes it a quiet, unassuming achievement.

Paul Hurley