James Franco does it again

 “Maladies” tries the spectator’s patience after just five minutes, and is best summed up in one word: wasteful.

It is wasteful of the talents of a fabulous cast, wasteful of an off-beat visual approach, and wasteful of our time.

It is even wasteful of a director whose instincts seem to lie more in the direction of classical, straightforward story he is at pains here to not give us.

Nope, this is a film that Comments On The Creative Process, and Refers To Itself As A Film and Makes Statements About Sexuality And Gender and Has Its Characters FIght With Their Real-Life Personas...So nope, this is nothing so old hat as a classically told story...

Which is not to say I am against the idea of filmmakers playing with the form or challenging norms...But only if the result is playful and/or challenging.

This is neither.

Ultimately it’s alienating and dull, in love with the idea of saying something deep and meaningful, but simply not having the necessary wisdom.

It’s a film born of director Carter’s  association with James Franco. So it’s easy to see how it appealed to the star, who never seems happier these days than when repackaging or reformatting his life and persona in the name of art.

Here he plays an ex-soap actor named James, and clips from Franco’s “General Hospital” are used for the soap-within-the-film.

Of course that appearance was itself approached as something of a "conceptual art project"…

So we reach the horizon of metatextuality and the universe deletes itself in a fizz of singularities and Higgs bosons…

 In fairness to Franco, however, he turns in a performance that is, by his standards, really quite committed.
It’s the difference between acting and representing...and since I am not sure I am so very interested anymore in what Franco stands for, I just wish he’d do more of the acting thing that he looks to be pretty good at.

But any small momentum is lost by the obsession of dividing the film into titled sections, each with a wise, opaque and enigmatic, would-be "deep" dialogue.

A chapter heading of “Everything needs to be made and everything needs to be made by someone” was bad enough, but by the time I was down to the off-repeated "At point A you are one person. At point B, you are another person. At point C, you are again transformed into yet another facet, angle, shard, area, zone," I basically wanted to punch the film in the face.

So while I may have been tempted to grade this up, due to some strong performances, that instinct is instantly cancelled by how annoyed I am that I wasn’t served better, and just how bored I was...

gd