Entanglement

This is as surprising a romantic comedy as I have seen in some time.

Director Jason James, working off a darkly amusing, often lovely script by Jason Filiatrault, effectively juggles the film's disparate, tone-shifting parts and bits of magic realism while coaxing memorable performances from Middleditch, Weixler and Bang.

Entanglement is gleefully weird at times, but it could’ve been a whole lot weirder.

Entanglement suffers from an unsureness in tone, somewhere between quirky and sombre.

Impressively photographed and perkily paced, Jason Filiatrault’s story never droops quite as much as its lead character, injecting a welcome poignancy that tempers the cuteness.

Ben’s carefully plotted healing diminishes the complexity of mental illness, and gives James’s sweet vision a bitter aftertaste. Filiatrault uses too-neat bookending in the place of dramatic resolution, so that the story of a man hanging on by a thread is nicely tied up in a bow.

Like James’ direction, full of off-center and oddly angled compositions that aren’t warranted by the action, Entanglement dresses up familiar romantic-comedy themes with affected gimmicks to jumbled ends.