Personal Effects (2009)

DVD

When you take a look at a DVD cover with Ashton Kutcher and Michelle Pfieffer on it, chances are good vibes won't be had, especially with how serious this movie looked based on the packaging. Sometimes, those vibes can be wrong, but in the case of Personal Effects, they were right on the money.

This is the kind of movie I can totally see Kutcher doing, because he likes to mix it up a lot between comedies and non-comedies, with films like The Guardian and Bobby sprinkled between his comedy forays like What Happened in Vegas. To his credit, though, it does seem that Kutcher does possess some solid dramatic acting chops... but he just doesn't seem to be able to pick the right projects to amplify those chops. Michelle Pfieffer is coming off some lighter fare herself with her fantastic turn in Stardust, her solid turn in a pretty formulaic/boring movie that was I Could Never Be Your Woman (one of the worst titles ever), and I could also see why she'd take this on, to get "serious" again, so to speak. Although, while they don't give the best performances of their lives here, neither of them are too bad here as two mismatched lovers who meet when their loved ones (his sister, her husband) are both murdered. The problem is that this heavy-handed story is way too artsy for its own good.

I have a feeling that writer-director David Hollander is a very big Paul Haggis fan, and it seems he's trying to take the same route as Haggis, in more ways than one. See, Haggis was a longtime TV writer working on several series and even creating a few of his own (co-creator of Walker Texas Ranger and Due South) and he quit the TV biz to focus on two spec scripts: Million Dollar Baby and Crash, which won Best Picture Oscars in consecutive years. Hollander created a couple of TV series himself, The Guardian and Heartland, but don't expect any Oscar nominations to come out of Personal Effects, his feature writing and directing debut. The story doesn't sound terribly bad on paper - a star collegiate wrestler, Walter (Kutcher) returns home upon news of his sister's brutal murder and tries to comfort his mother (Kathy Bates) and starts up a May-December romance with a woman in mourning, Linda (Michelle Pfieffer), whose husband was murdered apparently around the same time and is having trouble mourning and dealing with her rebellious, deaf son, Clay (Spencer Hudson, in a rather impressive film debut). From there it goes... kind of all over the place and kind of at a tortoise's pace. Maybe Hollander just wanted to really distance himself from TV here, by holding shots abnormally longer than he should've, as opposed to the quicker nature of TV, but this effect and his overall direction just makes a 110-minute film seem almost double that. While I don't expect dramas to have a snappy pace, this is borderline ridiculous here and aside from the length of the film, there are several exaggerated oddities like the bizarre way that Kutcher walks and the pseudo-stolen-from-Crash ending here. His few attempts at humor are futile, at best, and just plain confusing and incredibly awkward at worst. While I guess I get what Hollander was trying to say at large with the film, it just seems that he needs to develop a much better way for telling future stories on film.

Personal Effects is just a syrupy, over-told story that has the luxury of some good actors to rely on. Ashton Kutcher, Michelle Pfieffer, Kathy Bates and even young Spencer Hudson, in a very nice film debut, turn in some decent performances that sadly get bogged down in the boring machinations of the filmmaker's laboriously boring process.

We only get one feature here and that's a Behind the Scenes and even this thing drags like the film itself. We get some interview snippets from writer-director David Hollander, Ashton Kutcher and there's some decent stuff from Kutcher about how the character is similar to his own experiences, but they intercut these with way-too-long scenes from the film that, you guessed it, make this drag even longer. We also see some bits from Spencer Hudson, who plays Clay and apparently he's actually deaf and also never acted before, which actually makes his performance that much more impressive. Still, man, this thing just drags and plods along with these deep thoughts from Hollander and Kutcher, for the most part, and there's really no way this 19-minute feature needed to be nearly this long.

Despite its star-power casting, Personal Effects is a torturously slow film that might show off these actors' chops, but does so in the dullest possible fashion.