Wilson

An indie film from the director of "The Skeleton Twins" and the writer of "Ghost World", this seems like it should be on paper a slam-dunk. Unfortunately, this ends up feeling like a film whose time has passed. The problem is, it's very familiar territory - Woody Harrelson plays a slightly curmudgeonly, garroulous man who's isolated socially but winds up interacting with a few people (mostly women) anyway. Unfortunately, the treatment of most of these women is kinda marginal - Margo Martindale shows up for a scene, for example, only to be dismissed perfunctorily as the movie moves onto other thing. Laura Dern gets to carry more of the film as Wilson's ex wife but ultimately the film has to get back to being about dull Wilson rather than the interesting collateral damage of his tactless crashing-through their lives.

In some ways, this is like "Ghost World" if it was from the perspective of Steve Buscemi's character, which is to say, vast numbers of indie films made by men to gaze into the navels of men. Jon Brion's score is another memories of better indies past - it's way too intrusively mixed, trying to convince that what's going on is a jolly ironic romp rather than a disaster of a human being crashing down other people's lives. There is an interesting centre to the film (as Harrelson and Dern's plot gets more elaborate), but the early setup feels like weak sketches, and the ending has too many rewards for a character that never even vaguely starts to look like they should earn any of the rewards they get. So this is a bit of a disappointment.