It’s the story of a directionless young man who has an affair with an older woman, set to Simon & Garfunkel music, but the desperation with which this narcissistic melodrama tries to mimic
The Graduate only emphasizes how little director Marc Webb and screenwriter Allan Loeb seem to understand it. Recent college grad Thomas (Callum Turner) is fumbling through his days in Manhattan, until he discovers that his father (Pierce Brosnan) is cheating on his mother (Cynthia Nixon) with a gorgeous woman (Kate Beckinsale) with whom Thomas then becomes infatuated. There’s also a magical guru (Jeff Bridges) who appears to speak to Thomas exclusively in literary quotes, lending an even more insufferable quality to this story of privileged people who romanticize a “gritty” pre-gentrification New York that never would have touched them with violence or hardship. It’s hard to imagine that Loeb could have concocted a script more preposterous than the one he wrote for
Collateral Beauty, but here he is, celebrating youthful self-absorption in a collection of fanciful clichés where the
most plausible thing that happens is someone immediately hailing a New York City cab in the pouring rain.
By
Scott Renshaw