3 BACKYARDS

I’m been staring at a blank screen long after this movie finished trying to make some sense out what I had just seen. Its been some 11 years since filmmaker Eric Mendelsohn’s’ promising debut and Sundance Award winning movie ‘Judy Berlin’ and maybe he just used all that time to ‘over-think’ this totally incomprehensible follow up.  It is essential 3 totally separate stories that happen the same day in the same suburban town on the shores if Long Island.  There is no link between any of them, or any logical connection other than their locale.

One story is about a man having marriage problems who, when his business trip gets cancelled last minute, instead of returning home, hangs out near the airport hotel and begins to follow a mysterious woman. One is about a little girl who on her way to school loses an expensive bracelet of her mother’s and who must retrieve it from a local pervert’s backyard before she can return home. The third story concerns a star-struck housewife who is given the honor (?)  of driving a famous actress to the nearby ferry.  Each starts off with promise but they all soon go off at ridiculous tangents with plot twists that have you shaking in bewilderment.  It is so infuriating.

This movie has just two things going for it …. well, maybe three … firstly the housewife is played by the wonderful Edie Falco and she does her best with this ill-conceived story line, as does the ‘star’, Embeth Davidtz.  And the photography is nice.  That’s it.  I’m teetering between deciding if this is a self-indulgent precocious piece of nonsense a la ‘the emperors new clothes’, or it is simply just a very poor excuse of a film.  Either way, don’t waste a precious 90 minutes of your time in it.