Movies with multiple intersecting storylines aren’t exclusive to Los Angeles, but it’s a city for which they seem ideally suited, perhaps because it’s one in which incidental contact with the lives of strangers is less common and therefore more weighted with meaning. (Or maybe it’s just that L.A. has such an abundance of screenwriters sitting in coffee shops projecting potential narratives on passers-by.) Out of disparate threads we’re meant to draw common themes or emotional resonances, from Crash’s “everyone’s a little bit racist” to Magnolia’s ideas about loneliness and coming to terms with the past. Answers to Nothing, written and directed by Matthew Leutwyler (Dead & Breakfast), follows a group of linked lost souls navigating personal obstacles against the backdrop of a missing neighborhood girl, as they all come to discover that it’s OK to be an awful person, as long as you don’t tell anyone about it.
That’s no exaggeration. A Short Cuts full of self-pitying sociopaths, Answers to Nothing follows its characters toward a succession of increasingly queasy conclusions it tries to pass off as heartfelt and human. One offers a blessing to delusional vigilante justice, another suggests it’s the kind thing to do to not tell one’s wife about the extramarital affair she’s already pretty sure is going on, and a third presents pretending to be nice as the answer to self-loathing racism. Either Leutwyler has an incredibly dark view of human nature and this film is a kind of twisted poke at a…
Emilie de Ravin Emma Heming Emma Stone Emma Watson Emmanuelle Chriqui Emmanuelle Vaugier Emmy Rossum Erica Leerhsen Erika Christensen Estella Warren
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