1.5/5 Starring Jon Foster ‘amp; Sienna Miller Directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber Rated R
Dodgeball’ director Rawson Marshall Thurber has decided to throw audiences an earnest curveball in his latest coming-of-age saga shadowing ’80s college grad Art Bechstein (Jon Foster) as he unclenches himself from his father’s professional-gangster grip ‘mdash; at least for the summer. Adapted from the 1988 novel by Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, ‘The Mysteries of Pittsburgh’ means well and warm, but ultimately fails to conjure up any scrap of road-trip romanticism.
The film opens to Bechstein’s voiceover ‘mdash; peeled from the novel’s glass-half-empty first pages ‘mdash; and Thurber doesn’t let cynicism reign too long. Before we know it, he’s traded what we thought would be a self-reflective memoir for formulaic melodrama.
Making a sparkly-eyed connection with Jane Bellwether (the coy and smiley Sienna Miller) at an ex-roommate’s pool party, Bechstein’s minimum-wage life story at the Book Barn is put on hold.
He’s soon interrupted by Bellwether’s estranged yet jealous and coincidentally bisexual boyfriend Cleveland Arning (Peter Sarsgaard), who kidnaps Bechstein and playfully throws him over the rails of an abandoned steel mill ‘mdash; all accompanied by stilted commentary. ‘It was there, sitting 300 feet above the ground staring at a lunatic, that my summer finally began,’ rambles Bechstein.
Bechstein’s childlike, hesitant affection for Arning predictably evolves into homoerotic outings, chock full of life lessons. As Bellwether and Arning continue drifting apart, ‘Pittsburgh’ strains at emotional complexity but lacks the characters to make it possible.
While Thurber does a tolerable job of crafting a luminous visual tapestry ‘mdash; capturing a love triangle that traverses rural Pennsylvania on weekend getaways ‘mdash; he patches the lack of transitional queues in ‘Pittsburgh’ with Power Point transitions. Bolded white letters pasted against a black background fade to find Bechstein at a restaurant with his gruff father (Nick Nolte).’
While the steel city of Pittsburgh certainly seems to take on a personality of its own over the passing of seasons, Foster and Miller remain stale as the dusty Book Barn bargain shelf. Foster might’ve been crippled by Thurber’s decision to stay true to his novelistic inspiration (Bechstein’s passive-aggressive personality is difficult to portray on screen), but Miller ‘mdash; once typecast as the naive and sexually driven blonde, as in ‘Layer Cake’ and ‘Alfie’ ‘mdash; still manages to strip more successfully than deliver dialogue.
(If ‘Pittsburgh’ has one redeeming aspect, it’s undoubtedly Sarsgaard, who delivers a stunning performance as a teary-eyed roughrider right on cue.)
The film’s clumsy construction, masked by a saccharine narrative, leaves us wondering: What exactly was the mystery in the first place? Unfortunately,’ we’d quicker get out of the parking lot than attempt to solve it.