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NOVEMBER Send This Review to a Friend
The title refers only to one month, but sitting through “November” may seem like a year. This pretentious excursion into torturing an audience with the challenge of trying to figure out what’s really going on either on screen or in the mind of the filmmaker, Greg Harrison, is ponderous.
Courteney Cox plays Sophie, a photographer, and one night her boyfriend, Hugh, played by James Le Gros, is killed during a store robbery. What follows is a jumble of different time frames following Sophie’s emotional devastation and assorted strange events. The film is broken into sections labeled Denial, Desperation and Acceptance.
What is real? What is imagined? Is the conclusion real, or is it a symbolic coming to grips with the murder and Sophie reuniting in spirit with her dead lover? Was most of the story unreeling in Sophie’s mind?
The puzzle might be worth thinking about if the ingredients were more interesting. But the characters are boring, the performances don’t ignite and Benjamin Brand’s screenplay, given artsy directorial treatment, plods along on its esoteric wavelength. The result is a film that is annoying rather than fascinating. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
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