★★☆☆☆
Dir. Fernando Meirelles. 2011. R. 110mins. In English, German, Arabic, French, Portuguese, Russian, with subtitles. Rachel Weisz, Jude Law, Anthony Hopkins.
Round and round and round we go; when the “we’re all connected” movies will stop, nobody knows. Fernando Meirelles’s 360 is neither the best nor the worst of a genre that claims Max Ophüls’s La Ronde as its zenith and Paul Haggis’s Crash as its barrel-scraper. Meirelles’s continent-hopping tale of disaffected souls in various states of emotional duress and physical undress is grim yet watchable from its first scene, in which a neophyte Bratislavan prostitute (Lucia Siposova) strips in a long, cold-blooded shot while a fortune-cookie voiceover muses about “forks in the road.” It takes a little time for the celebrities to show up, but then the head-slapping coinkidinks begin: It turns out the call girl is scheduled to meet with a married English businessman (Law) whose wife (Weisz) is having an affair in London with a hottie photographer (Juliano Cazarré). The photog’s angry girlfriend (Maria Flor) leaves him and meets a grieving father (Hopkins) on a flight to Denver, where they’re waylaid by a snowstorm and a convicted sex offender (Ben Foster), and…
Meirelles and screenwriter Peter Morgan — who cites Arthur Schnitzler’s 1897 play Reigen (also the basis for La Ronde) as his primary inspiration — treat every twist and turn with a sick-soul-of-mankind solemnity that seems conspicuously awards-trolling (and probably a few years out of date). Scene by scene, you want to laugh at all the ham-fisted kismet, even if the committed cast holds your attention. Hopkins is especially good in his chaste May-September interactions with Flor, and he has an AA confessional that is genuinely moving. But any lingering goodwill is sapped in the final minutes when a character earnestly opines, “We have come full circle.” Talk about a cycle that needs breaking.—Keith Uhlich
