Critic Reviews

Third Person is Paul Haggis' best movie, and the one he has been building toward for years.

I came away impressed at how Haggis made something original and real.

Though virtually every twist on this emotional roller coaster feels preordained by its architect, the director leaves certain mysteries for the audience to interpret, making for a more open-ended and mature work all around.

Haggis lets us get way ahead of the characters and the figure out what the title of this writerly tale — Third Person — has to do with the sometimes illogical connections between stories. That’s not a problem. Dragging, dragging dragging the tales out after he reaches a logical climax and something close to a resolution with each is not.

Wonderful as it is to watch great actors delve deeply into their roles, it’s a shame that the material they are delivering is just so damn confusing.

Third Person staggers well over the two-hour mark only to self-destruct in a burst of overwrought cleverness.

Third Person’s considerable strengths generally come from the actors.

Everything gets just too damn convoluted for its own good, and it’s hard to care what becomes of Haggis’ characters as they’re shifted around. Any one of the strands expanded alone might have worked better.

The drama and intensity that are [Haggis's] signatures are mostly missing from these vividly dramatized but uninvolving romantic crises, none of which are particularly believable.

The revelation is Wilde. A slender beauty with high cheekbones, she makes Anna a full-fledged neurotic, candid and demanding and changeable, shifting abruptly from snuggling happiness to angry defiance.