Personal Velocity

The title may sound like a Steven Seagal movie, but this is really a super-serious art film about the separate lives of three different women: an abused wife (Kyra Sedgwick), a book editor (Parker Posey) and a pregnant teen (Fairuza Balk). All three storylines were written and directed by Rebecca Miller (daughter of playwright Arthur Miller) and based on her own book. It’s the kind of ambitious, pedigreed production guaranteed to wow critics and win awards at Sundance, but it’s absolutely dead on the screen. Miller “adapts” her stories by giving great, indigestible slabs of high-falutin prose to an unseen narrator (John Ventimiglia, the de facto star), thereby telling us things a real filmmaker would show us. The narration is awful; it sounds like an entry in some bad-writing contest. Meanwhile, three fine actresses are wasted.