Michael Chabon’s Novel Inspires a Screen Coming-of-Age Tale (original) (raw)

Movies|A Stockbroker in Training Has Turns in His Journey

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/10/movies/10pitt.html

Movie Review | 'The Mysteries of Pittsburgh'

A Stockbroker in Training Has Turns in His Journey

Peter Sarsgaard, left, and Jon Foster in Rawson Marshall Thurber’s “Mysteries of Pittsburgh.”Credit...Bruce Birmelin/Peace Arch Entertainment

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

Directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber

Adventure, Comedy, Drama

1h 35m

April 10, 2009

If, after Greg Mottola’s charming “Adventureland,” which opened last week, you find yourself in the mood for another tale of a recent college graduate’s coming of age in Pittsburgh one crazy summer in the 1980s, you may be in luck. Or not, since even the most passionate fan of Pittsburgh-in-the-’80s-crazy-summer-coming-of-age stories is likely to be disappointed by “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,” a clumsy and confused adaptation of Michael Chabon’s 1988 novel.

That Rawson Michael Thurber, who directed and wrote the screenplay, was motivated by sincere affection for Mr. Chabon’s book is evident in his scrupulous attempt to capture the novel’s delicate tone, which is poised between whimsy and heartbreak. A certain amount of the author’s prose has been transferred directly into the movie in the form of voice-over narration, which turns the main character’s wry naïveté into glum and redundant pretension. His name is Art Bechstein, and he is played by Jon Foster, who is attractive and well behaved but, at least in the absence of strong direction, a fairly inert screen presence.

Art’s story meanders from one fraught incident to another without much resonance or momentum. His father, played with gruff efficiency by Nick Nolte, is a local gangster who is urging his son toward a respectable career as a stockbroker. While he studies for the Series 7 exam, Art works in a discount bookstore and carries on an affair with his supervisor, Phlox (Mena Suvari), who never rises above the level of a moderately misogynist, blatantly snobbish caricature. Art is distracted by the ravishing Jane (Sienna Miller) and her volatile, bisexual boyfriend, Cleveland. (“Like the state?” Phlox asks, just so we know that she’s too dumb for our sympathy.)

Played by Peter Sarsgaard, Cleveland is a potentially interesting character, and both Mr. Sarsgaard and Ms. Miller do their best (though just what accent Ms. Miller is attempting is hard to guess) to push beyond the film’s hazy, romantic view shared with the book of who they are. Mr. Thurber’s suave camera movements, the slightly weary natural beauty of Pittsburgh and a piquant score (by Theodore Shapiro) provide the impression of a style, but the absence of any credible emotion beyond Art’s passive-aggressive anomie cripples the story before it begins.

When, at the end, the plot accelerates, and things start to look interestingly complicated, it’s too late. You’re left not with any feeling or insight, but rather with nothing much beyond the vague impression that Mr. Thurber, whose previous film was the Ben Stiller comedy “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story,” is a big fan of Mr. Chabon’s “Mysteries of Pittsburgh.” Even viewers who share his admiration for the book may leave the theater wondering what he saw in it.

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