Anesthesia (2016)
Directed by Tim Blake Nelson
Multiple lives intersect in the aftermath of the violent mugging of a Columbia University philosophy professor.
2 connections found
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2 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Anesthesia to
In the ensemble style of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts or Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth or Paul Haggis’s recent Third Person, Anesthesia examines how a tragic event can, for better or worse, be a jolt that throws aftershocks into the lives that it touches.
It’s a copycat formula that was perfected in radically superior films like Alejandro Iñárritu’s Babel and Altman’s Short Cuts.
The uniformly strong cast (which also, for some reason, includes Glenn Close in a nothing role as the professor’s wife) does its best to put some flesh on the thematic skeleton, and they collectively manage to avoid the laughable histrionics that plague Paul Haggis’ Crash (still the nadir of this quasi-genre).
A noble semi-failure in an ignoble sub-genre, Tim Blake Nelson’s “Anesthesia” is one of those dreaded everyone-is-connected daisy chains a la “Crash.”
But other directors, like Mike Figgis with Timecode and Paul Haggis with Crash , saw only the possibility to configure their statuses as contemplative artists by using the narrative model to trite and gimmicky effects, with coincidence and manipulation as the template's new raison d'etre.
Anesthesia is an upscale Crash centering on the allegedly profound interconnectedness among a group of seemingly disparate individuals and random events.
Writer-director-actor Tim Blake Nelson is a smart, savvy, veteran filmmaking presence, and he’s to be commended for shooting for the intellectual and philosophical stars in “Anesthesia,” but this ensemble piece plays like “Crash” in a minor note, with one heavy-handed scene after another, all leading up to an ambivalent, unsatisfying ending.
Like a tonier East Coast response to Paul Haggis’s “Crash,” the film effortfully pushes its characters together only to observe the ways in which they largely resist contact.