13 CONVERSATIONS ABOUT ONE THING (Jill Sprecher, 2002)

Reviewed: June 17, 2002

The problem's not that 13 Conversations About One Thing isn't entertaining; the flick's intriguing, moves well and never bores. But it's also never profound (and its crime is that it both tries to be profound and thinks it succeeds). The problem is that 13 Conversations never sparkles. It's too on-the-nose to stand a chance.

Or as one friend said: "It didn't teach me anything new about life, but I liked it."
Or as another friend said: "It was good, but its ideas weren't that interesting and it's not the kind of movie I'd ever wanna see again."

Here's my impression: director/co-screenwriter Jill Sprecher and her co-screenwriter sister Karen Sprecher came up with a few specific ideas and lines and situations they wanted to put in a movie (never a bad start, mind you), but unfortunately never bothered expanding. Every line of dialogue in 13 Conversations About One Thing is so blatant and direct and relentlessly philosophical that they all seem to address fundamental issues of humanity's never-ending pursuit of happiness and the irreversibility of actions and accepting fate and dealing with guilt and experiencing redemption. But where's the in-between stuff?

The script reads like a conscious decision was made to have every line Be About Something, but the result is paradoxical-- the dialogue just isn't that interesting. I suppose the argument could be made 'hey, how can anyone teach the proverbial audience anything new about life, everything's already been thought of and said.' My answer: while it might be impossible in this day and age to have a shattering insight into The Way We Live, what's still a formidable yet manageable challenge is to dress an old insight up in such striking, glorious new clothes that people absorb the information or the emotion or the essence in ways they never have previous. The trick is being sneaky about being deep.

Regrettably, the Sprecher Sisters' script is stridently unsubtle, right down to the could-they-be-any-more-obvious title cards (I think there's thirteen in total, but I didn't count) that divide each mini-story, as well as the title of the film itself. Did Jill and Karen ever think maybe the viewer could figure out the movie's four interlocking stories deal with the same theme without being told so?

13 Conversations also has chronology and segmenting errors, overextending its reach with its inclusion of John Turturro's storyline. Turturro plays a professor whose mugging awakens him to how discontent he is, to his desire "to do what everyone wants, to experience life." His first course of action is cheating on his wife (Amy Irving), then leaving her. While Turturro is excellent and his classroom lectures give Sprecher some very convenient opportunities to impart some of her alleged wisdom, his entire storyline felt ultimately superfluous. It's mostly comprised of a series of uninteresting clichés and climaxes in an unconvincing subplot straight out of Saved By the Bell.

This structuring problem runs deeper. Alan Arkin's storyline, in which he plays the manager of a tiny, fledging crew of insurance workers, is given the largest chunk of screentime, occupying most of the middle of the movie. His storyline is easily the most compelling in the film, and it is during his segments that the movie comes closest to elevating itself towards greatness. By the time Sprecher leaves Arkin to go back to Turturro (or perhaps it was someone else's story; the other two follow Clea DuVall as an angelic, hapless cleaning lady and Matthew McConaughey as a--pay attention, cheap irony police--defense lawyer who, himself, is guilty), I didn't care about anyone but Arkin. In fact, I would have loved if 13 Conversations About One Thing was indeed a movie whose one thing was just Arkin's character. Arkin does marvelous work and a character study of him would make for a fascinating piece. The Sprecher Sisters' storyline juggle also fails to properly engage because they refuse to cut back and forth between the lines equally, thereby failing to maintain consistent rhythm. Their whole timeline is so unnecessarily screwy.

I'm holding 13 Conversations About One Thing up to high standards due to the scope of its ambition. Credit must be given to Jill and Karen for crafting a pretty complex film that tackles a lot of heady topics, as it's no small feat to make a film in that vein which never devolves into tedium. As director Jill not only coaxes superb performances out of a strong cast (again, particularly Arkin), but her sparse visuals have a unique quality I can't quite place my finger on. I just wish I also couldn't so easily place my finger on the film as a whole.

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