A listless interpretation of Michael Chabon's first novel, Mysteries of Pittsburgh features none of the source material's charm, but has coming-of-age film cliches in abundance.
A listless interpretation of Michael Chabon's first novel, Mysteries of Pittsburgh features none of the source material's charm, but has coming-of-age film cliches in abundance.
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Average Rating: 2.6/5
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A recent college graduate desperate to have one last fling before launching himself into the real world falls into a strange love triangle with a charismatic couple in director Rawson Thurber's feature adaptation of Michael Chabon's freshman novel. Peter Sarsgaard, Mena Suvari, Nick Nolte, Sienna Miller, and Jon Foster star in a film that was adapted for the screen by director Thurber. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi
The real mystery about The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is how writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber could turn Michael Chabon's delightful debut novel into such a bore.
When characters say things like "It's gonna be a great summer," or call someone "Old sport" and act oh-so-beautifully doomed, it's time to call the cliché police.
A mess of a movie, looking to contort Chabon's novel into a darkly personal story of choice and desire. Instead the film sloppily lumbers around in search of a consistent dramatic path. It's handsome enough, just wildly misguided from frame one.
Guts the book of complexity and ambiguity and reduces it to another trite coming-of-age story with a badly written voice-over narrative by a boring post-adolescent.
Michael Barrett's cinematography gives the film and the city of Pittsburgh just enough of a picturesque dream-like quality that, like its protagonist, you'll remember.
Shoddy and never credible, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is an ungainly coming-of-age drama based on a (hopefully much better) novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon.
Somehow, even as writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber slathers on the voiceover ooze or unwittingly evokes Sophie's Choice with his central romantic triangle, he still manages to astonish with The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.
Sarsgaard revels in a character who attracts all eyes and mouths, but the narration is too much of an explanatory crutch to parse the roundelay of identity exploration.
In "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh," at first glance, Art(Jon Foster) might seem to be committing career suicide by having sex with his supervisor Phlox(Mena Suvari) all over their workplace. But then this is just a summer job for Art at the Book Barn while he considers his next move, so where's the harm? His
father(Nick Nolte), a gangster of ill-repute who he has dinner with once a month in a swanky restaurant, has his next five moves planned which include passing his stock trading exam and working in Baltimore. That's where his career comes in. Where Jane(Sienna Miller) comes in is at a party, after which they go eat pie. After that, Jane's boyfriend Cleveland(Peter Sarsgaard) takes Art for a ride.
"The Mysteries of Pittsburgh" is a disappointingly inert adaptation of Michael Chabon's novel(I don't remember that much about it except its ending and that I liked it). In its depiction of a transitional year of 1983, it is about a person caught between the respectability he dreads and the eccentric friends he loves. On the one hand, the movie keeps the central relationships intact, but also manages to lose a lot of the book's offbeat energy in its move to the screen which is best exemplified by the casting of non-entity Jon Foster in the lead. That's not to mention too much reliance on daddy issues and droning narration which does eventually disappear. The supporting cast is very, very good but even they cannot save a movie where there is no center.
June 23, 2010
Walter M.
Super Reviewer
It's A Home At the End of the World all over again - i.e., one of my most favorite books (which coincidentally also centres on, but is not limited to, a complicated love triangle) is simplified so much that not only are almost all sub-plots removed, but the main plot is so diluted that nothing much of any consequence
seems to happen. Even though, in actuality, a lot does happen. Simply put, this is a mediocre adaptation of a superior novel. What elevates this slightly above A Home are some excellent performances. Peter Sarsgaard handles his ambisexual (my term) character with skill, and Jon Foster comes close to matching this, although his monotone delivery can be hard to follow. It's little wonder this failed to set the box-office on fire but it still remains a big disappointment, particularly since Michael Chabon's works lend themselves very well to adaptation (Wonder Boys is evidence of that).
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